Was advised on another forum I need to open a different wallet in order to "bridge" the two wallets and transfer funds from electrum to new wallet.
Do not do this! There is absolutely no need to send your coins to somewhere else. And how would they expect you to make that transfer if you cannot access your coins in the first place?
The BITREF site and Blockchain.com shows the coins are still in the wallet address I own.
So in that case your coins are perfectly safe and you haven't been hacked, there is just some local problem with your Electrum software which we need to fix.
When you open the original wallet or the wallet file you restored from your seed phrase, click on the "Addresses" tab. (Click View -> Show Addresses in the toolbar if you don't see the addresses tab). Do you see the addresses you expect to see, the ones you were looking up on blockchain.com?