In three months, at Pesach, we will have completed nine years since the founding of GAJE. Our mission was then, and remains, to help make Jewish education in our community affordable for every family that wishes to send its children to a Jewish day school.
It was our view in the Spring of 2015 that “the affordability of Jewish education is the most important immediate and long-term priority for our community leaders…. By striving to make Jewish education more affordable, we fulfill a moral obligation to our community and a historic obligation to the wider Jewish people.”
That is still our view today.
October 7 and its disheartening aftermath, alas, have added laser-light clarity to that view and has unambiguously, if painfully, affirmed the pre-eminent importance of Jewish education.
The aftermath of October 7 has reminded us, especially outside of Israel, that a strong, resolute, organized and caring community is the chief instrument of our first response to threats to Jewish survival. The shared, concentric nucleic circle of our lives is the Judaism of common history, traditions, values, and purpose. It is the foundation of the remarkable architecture we call “community” that connects us one to the other and helps sustain us through travail and challenge.
History has taught us that the best – though not the only – way to build community and a sense of peoplehood among Jews is through education. There is no mystery to this formula.
Rabbi Marc D. Angel, whom we have often quoted in this weekly update, reminds us that “Children are not born into a historical vacuum. They are heirs to the generations of their family going back through the centuries and millennia….[T]he challenge to the older generations is to transmit to the new generations a feeling of connectedness with the past.”
Wherever Jews have lived throughout our long history – in the Land of Israel and in our wanderings – we have always ensured that feelings of connectedness with the past inspired the building and maintaining of a structure of community.
Taking their cue from the Bible, our Sages referred to this structure as a “holy community” (kehila kedosha). What made the community “holy”, our Sages took great pains to remind us, was how we behaved, especially one toward the other. Very few among us, if any, needs reminding after October 7, that if there were ever a time to demonstrate holiness as a community one toward the other, that time is now.
Holiness – kehila kedosha – begins with education. Education leads to the establishment of true community. Community directs actions and behaviours whose highest aim is to demonstrate care and concern one for the other. And that leads us back to kehila kedosha, which in turn, brings us to the importance of affordable Jewish education.
Ontario’s educational funding supports and prefers one religion to the exclusion of the others in our province. Indeed, to the ongoing perplexity and frustration of most knowledgeable observers, Ontario contributes nothing to enable families to enroll their children in independent schools – unlike the educational funding practices of the next five most populous provinces in the country.
As readers of this weekly update know, GAJE launched an application in court to compel Ontario to change its unfair, anachronistic policies. The government tried to have our application thrown out of court without a hearing on its merits. They then brought a motion for permission to appeal the ruling. We await the outcome of the government’s motion for leave to appeal.
•••
If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit for fairness in educational funding, please click here.
For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com
Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of underwriting the costs of the lawsuit.
•••
Shabbat shalom
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)
January 5, 2024
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education 