I had originally planned to use this column as a forum in which to document my plans for the upcoming year, to list my hopes and aspirations for the future of this newspaper. Last week, however, I was witness to a disturbing event and have decided to write on a subject that is, in my opinion, of greater consequence. I will thus save the traditional content for a "first column as Editor-In-Chief" until next fall.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to watch the recently produced documentary, "The Lost Days," a film depicting the travels of five individuals through the Hell of Nazi Germany. I was horrified to see footage of piled bodies, starved and faceless, being shoved by bulldozers into mass burial pits. They showed an actual furnace where Jews were reduced to piles of Jewish ash, and I realized that I was staring at a monument to the infinite inhumanity of man and society gone insane, a monument washed by millions of gallons of human blood, a monument engraved with the ghosts and memories of Jews and Germans trapped in a drama so horrible and so unreal that the world would never again be the same.

Now, allow me to change the scene a bit, create one of my own. A group of American college students, sitting comfortably in a heated room, are expressing their opinion that it is not the moral obligation of a country to end foreign genocide. "The humans that are suffering and dying are not our people, not our concern," they say. "If another country would like to kill its own people, that's their business," they assert.

Frustrating, isn't it? If only those individuals knew what it was like to suffer, to watch as family and friends are killed before their very own eyes. What if I now tell you that this conversation was real? That it did not take place in the dark and caliginous years that were the 1940's, but in the modern, historically-aware year of 1999? What if I inform you that this was not the communal discourse of a group of ignorant WASPs, but the mundane discussion of a classroom filled with Yeshiva University boys talking about the crisis in Kosovo?

That's right, these remarks were made by students in one of my classes (Jewish History class, ironically). I sat astonished as most students agreed that we, as Jews and Americans, should not be interested in the ethnic cleansing that is currently taking place overseas. They went further to attack Israel for its recent decision to send aid to the refugees in Kosovo.

It wouldn't be so frightening if their statements had been politically motivated, if they had merely felt that the US and Israel were handling the situation incorrectly. But their contentions were not followed by suggestions of more tactful military strategies. They merely stated that we should not be morally concerned with a nation that isn't our own. How easily we forget. It was only fifty years ago that our people were in the gas chambers, that our grandparents were starving, degraded and pathetic. After the Shoah, the Jews arose, and in unison we declared, "Never again!." This expression has gradually became our silent anthem, the battle song of a nation almost obliterated by one of the most extreme and unpredictable events in the history of civilization. It seems as though we must qualify those famous words a bit, change them ever so slightly, so that our anthem flows contemporaneously with our actions. "Never again - to us!" we should say, because evidently we aren't so affected by the suffering of other groups.

We use the word "Holocaust" to our advantage so frequently that it's slowly beginning to lose its power. Whenever a public figure makes an anti-Semitic remark we cry Holocaust, like an old lady complaining of a bad back so that she can guilt her children into visiting more often. Whenever the Jews are being blamed for something, we tactfully remind the world of the gross suffering that took place in the middle of this century. Yet when another ethnic group is being singled out and murdered, we don't even blink twice. We haven't forgiven Roosevelt for not bombing the tracks that led to Auschwitz, how then do we have the collective nerve to state that the United States should not involve itself in this recent holocaust?

We must learn to separate the political components from those which are basic and human. Suffering is still suffering, regardless of race, sex, nationality or creed. The events taking place in Kosovo should hit each and everyone of us in the most sensitive of spots; it should alert our senses, trigger an indigenous response, one of reason and rationality. Jews should have been the first to speak out, but we weren't - and truly scares me. Whether we agree with NATO's or Israel's specific military actions is irrelevant. It is essential, though, that we feel a strong sense of moral obligation to help any nation that is suffering so grandly. Let us not forget the heat of those furnaces, those monuments, because if we do: who will help us next time?