- We remind you that GAJE will be part of the upcoming Limmud Toronto Conference on Sunday March 6. Limmud is a dynamic educational program in many communities around the world. We hope that you will attend the conference and especially the session concerning GAJE. We hope that you will tell friends and family about the conference and urge them to attend too.
For information about the conference, visit www.Limmud.ca.
- We have recently started to feature stories written by parents about the financial and, in some cases, other hardships they face in sending their children to day school. The stories have been sent to us at the initiative of the writers. While protecting the writers’ privacy, they are a courageous testament to the strength and determination of families to provide a Jewish education to their children.
You can read these stories here.
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In October 1996, the Centre for Jewish Studies held a groundbreaking conference at York University on the subject of “Creating the Jewish Future.” Three years later, the proceedings of the conference were published in a volume under the same title. Professors Michael Brown and Bernard Lightman were its editors. It is a volume of many treasures.
Professor Brown, a renowned historian and scholar, is the former Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. The Introduction he wrote for the publication is a summary description of the overall condition – demographic, cultural, social, religious and communal – of North American Jewry as of the mid 1990’s. Prof. Brown succinctly sets the stage for the purpose of the conference and for the results conference organizers hoped to achieve. Among the many gem-like statements by Prof. Brown is the following inspiring exhortation. It applies to our work.
“If North American Jewry wishes to survive into the next millennium, it cannot allow blind forces to determine its destiny. It must create its own future out of the legacy of the past and the realities of the present. As Morton Weinfeld notes in chapter 19 of this volume, the future is not determined; it need not be accepted passively; it can be shaped and created. But if the community is to take its fate into its own hands, then present reality and future goals must be clearly defined and squarely faced.”
We must – and we will – help our community shape and create a future in which Jewish education is affordable.
Shabbat shalom,
GAJE
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education 