Rabbi Dr. David Nesenoff
The writer speaks all over the world on topics of Women in Judaism, Shabbos, Anti-Semitism, Israel, Chabad and Chassidus. He can be contacted at: nesenoff@gmail.com.I have often thought about, “Where was the world during the Holocaust?” Didn’t anyone hear at that time about pogroms, boycotts, synagogue burnings, ghettos, yellow stars, anti-Semitic cartoons, concentration camps, gas chambers? Maybe an urgent telephone call was made somehow to New York or a telegram with short frantic sentences? Perhaps a crude photograph by a witness was mailed or a scratchy piece of film delivered by a passenger in steerage escaping the genocide on a ship.
Was communication that bad, that undeveloped, so rudimentary and unsophisticated that the message of Holocaust, or even “trouble”, didn’t get through to people’s minds? Surely one of the numerous humanitarian organizations or synagogues somewhere in the United States somehow got a hint of an SOS smoke signal coming from Europe.
But I resigned my bewilderment of the dispassionate globe with the explanation that there was a lack of technology. The silent apathetic world was on account of the crude communication that the dial up, rotary phone and antiquated era presented to the ancient civilization of the early and mid-1900s. And even if a frame of film or a text of a telegram or a morsel of a message got through, who could believe the magnitude of such a horror being protracted against an entire people? It would take the kind of science fiction communication system and futuristic transporters and flying cars to deliver the accurate portrayal of what was really happening in Germany and France and Belgium and Poland and Austria.
That’s it. That answered my question as to why the world and the people of America did not know about the Holocaust. Because, for sure, if they could just really hear and see what was going on - then they would react. Everyone would be outraged and take action and stop the madness.
Welcome to the world of 2019. Need I list it? I guess I will. Cell/camera phones, 24 hour international TV, radio and podcasts, Facebook and Facetime, Youtube and Periscope, Whatsapp, Google, Email, GMail, Snapchat and Twitter. Yes, Yahoo!, we are all connected. All is transmitted, transponded and transparent. You say it; we hear it. You do it; we see it. And “we” is everyone, everybody, every person, every village, city, country, hemisphere and satellite. We don’t have flying cars, but we’ve got jets, and vehicles that drive themselves and drones with cameras. We are unfettered and embedded. We have texts and Alexa. We found water on Mars and the Titanic at the bottom of the sea. We know what is going on in the universe at all times everywhere.
We Youtube Palestinians stabbing Jews in the Israeli marketplace as iphones snap pics of cribs filled with Jewish blood. We stream a rabbi with fingers blown off telling us how he stood over a Jewish woman’s shot-up body in his California synagogue. Global cable networks broadcast Iran’s declaration to destroy every Jew while supplying rockets to Gaza as we watch, in real-time, bombs landing on Jewish civilians in Sderot. Podcasts fly through our wifi with a rewritten history, told by a U.S. congresswoman, of how the Arabs, who in 
Just go to the East River in New York City and listen to the United Nations Assembly that is ‘broad-banded’ around the world calling for plans that would cause the destruction of the Jewish homeland.
reality colluded with Hitler and murdered Jews returning to their ancient homeland way before the Holocaust, actually were responsible for saving the Jewish people from the Holocaust.
No need to decipher a hidden code or deliver microfilm with secret messages. Just go to the East River in New York City and listen to the United Nations Assembly that is ‘broad-banded’ around the world calling for plans that would cause the destruction of the Jewish homeland.
Or upload any number of a thousand news’ Apps reporting on Nancy Pelosi and the entire Democratic Party refusing to condemn their fellow comrades when they speak, secrete and tweet, anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic, hateful words and concepts.
We have gone from a non-televised Holocaust to a fully broadcasted, multimedia, ad sponsored, congress-sanctioned, stabbing, shooting and massacre while sitting in our Uber on the way to our Airbnb. Maybe the problem wasn’t technology when it came to the apathetic world during the last Holocaust.
No. And it wasn’t and isn’t apathy either. And it isn’t even sympathy for the evil-doers. It is just pathetic. Simply pathetic. It is pitiful, despicable and contemptible. The hate for the Jew and even the allowance of that hate by other Jews is beyond technology. This insidious, ageless, timeless abhorrence and hostility toward the Children of Israel was heard way before the bing notifications on our androids and even before the sound of the Shofar blasting from the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe taught that this hatred should not be confused with some envious or jealous feelings. The root stems from the recognition that the world acknowledges, whether they want to admit it or not, or even if they even realize it or not, that the code of morality was given at Mount Sinai to the Jewish people. There is an intrinsic desire by many to want a world without morality. The disgusting belief is that perhaps if the Jew was gone we can return to such a world. The iphone 8,9,10 or 200 will not shed any new light on this question regarding the immoral desire to decimate the Jew.
The answer, and survival, to the world of hate has always been the same. The practicing of Sinai’s morality itself with exacting calculation and ethical, lawful behavior is the key and the organic G-d-given technology that stands in the face of generational hate. It is the reason the Jewish people have remained and sustained.
And those who don’t even have the single moral fiber in their being to condemn a congresswoman from Michigan - who thinks she can tell the world that Nazi-sympathizing Arabs rescued Jews from the Holocaust - will become obsolete as the antiquated telegraph and as the decimated Nazis themselves. And the Jewish people will gather and return to Zion and Jerusalem. Tweet that!
Rabbi Dr. David Nesenoff is an international speaker on topics of Israel, Anti-Semitism, Judaism and the media. Dr. Nesenoff is globally known for his video exposing Helen Thomas at the White House during her anti-Jewish rant causing her expulsion from the Washington Press Corps after 60 years.