Quote: "Waiting for several lawyers to contact me back"
It would be incredibly silly for you to contact a lawyer, who would have as very little likelihood of being able to answer a specific question about your PA unemployment insurance as it would be for anyone on the street or the internet. If you cannot get past the busy signal, it means that someone, somewhere, is on the phone with the PA system. Eventually it will be you. It may take a while, but it does happen. Start calling early, as soon as the office opens for the day, expect a wait of sometimes an hour or two, but really, dismissing that you can't get an answer and so you're going to lawyer up...well, that's pretty futile.
It is a time of particularly low unemployment in most states, so persistent effort to call in over several days, begun early, is probably going to work for you. There is no way that that attorney you're waiting for is going to be able to put you at the front of the line. Most unemployment insurance claims aren't for enough money to make hiring an attorney worth your while, and it doesn't help the process or begin moving into civil court until you have gone through the full agency application and appeals process, which are designed so that having an attorney doesn't really give you a lot of help, and it is not something you have to "fight" for, like they talk about on those late night lawyer commercials. This is an agency, it is NOT a court case, you don't have to sue anybody to be approved or to receive benefits, and it is not something you have to go in fighting about. The system is set up not to be tilted in the favor of either the employers who pay in most of the tax money for unemployment or the claimants, who do, in PA, pay in a tiny bit of it. But the situation you describe, where you have wages in more than one state during the base period, is very common. They deal with it all the time in every state.
The answer you seek is yes, PA will "accept" as you put it, NJ wages from a covered NJ employer, their system has the capability to send for and pull in these wages in the appropriate quarters from the New Jersey system. This will set up what is called a combined wage claim. Since your last separating employer is in PA, and you now reside in PA, you will very likely have a PA claim with your adjudication of all other issues, such as separation issues, WBA amounts, etc. coming from PA. IF you have not enough wages in PA, and you do have enough wages in New Jersey for a full claim, you might end up with a New Jersey unemployment claim which you get to draw out in PA.
The reason amounts earned are an issue is that there must be, according to each state's specific formula, enough covered (tax paying employer) wages in the specific quarters to set up a claim. Some states require that there be wages in two or more quarters in order to set up their state's claim, or that there be a certain amount in each quarter, etc. But the system is not out to keep you from getting any claim you might be entitled to set up for, they will, when you get through to them, probably be quite helpful in suggesting how to file the "combined wage" or other state's claim that you very well may have. They are not your enemy, and you do not need to go in with an adversarial approach.