Weekly Update: September 16, 2016 — 13 Elul 5776

The moral and financial burdens

The Tikvah Fund, a New York based philanthropic foundation and ideas institution undertakes various educational initiatives to support the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish State to advance Jewish excellence and Jewish flourishing in the modern age.

Recently, one of the Tikvah Fund scholars, Eric Cohen, spoke with Cato Institute policy analyst, Jason Bedrick, about the economic and moral burden arising from the high cost of Jewish education in the United States. Their conversation is available as a podcast on the Fund’s website (www.tikvahfund.org).

The following is the introduction to the podcast that appears on the website:

“Jewish education is an important source of Jewish continuity in America. This is has been true in all times and places throughout the Jewish diaspora, but it is all the more so in the United States, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal. In America, with its individual freedoms, the most potent threat to the Jewish community is not anti-Semitic persecution of old, but assimilation.

“The threat of assimilation in modern America makes an education in Jewish particularism and Jewish peoplehood especially important, and yet the cost of Jewish education is a growing burden on Jewish families—entailing not only a financial burden, but a moral burden as well.”

While much of the substance of the Cohen-Bedrick discussion pertains to the legal/constitutional situation in the United States, many of the generic arguments pointing out the urgency of the need for more affordable Jewish education apply in our jurisdiction as well.

The key point for us to retain, however, is this: The affordability of Jewish education is increasingly appearing on the public agenda of Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora.

Solutions to the crisis are now on the horizon. It falls to us to bring the horizon closer to us.

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Reminder

The Taste of Limmud, which begins at 3:00 pm on Sunday September 18, at the Schwartz/Reisman Centre – Joseph & Wolfe Lebovic Jewish Community Campus
9600 Bathurst Street, Vaughan, has dedicated an entire track of study and discussion to the subject of Jewish Education.

For more information on the conference, please visit LIMMUD.ca.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE