Some three and a half decades ago in the United States, community leaders and elders – usually a reference to men and women mostly in the second half of their lives – felt a need to respond urgently to the documented slow growth (minus growth?) of the Jewish population. One of the continent-wide, collective communal responses to the unfolding demographic crisis was the embrace of “Jewish Continuity” as a purposive theme for new programming aimed at Jewish youth.
There is a new crisis within the Jewish community of the United States. It may also be encroaching upon the Canadian Jewish community, but there are fewer overt signs that this is the case. At least for now.
The crisis is the marked falling away of support for Israel among large numbers of young American Jews. Many different poll results have been published during the past two years purporting to document the attitudes of young American Jews toward Israel.
One report, however, still sticks out, with full, flashing, red-light alarm. It appeared in the Jerusalem Post last November. According to a survey conducted, at that time, for Mosaic United, with the aid of Israel’s Diaspora Affairs and Combatting Antisemitism Ministry, some “37% of American Jewish teens expressed sympathy for Hamas. Similarly, 42% of US Jewish teens believed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.” The report noted that American Jewish youth held a significantly lower opinion of Israel than their cohorts throughout the Diaspora. It added, somewhat laconically, that the divergence of views between American Jewish teens and the rest of the world’s Jewish teens, was “worrying” and “influenced by differences in culture, community, and education.” (Our emphasis)
The numerous other surveys that have been released at various stages of Israel’s existential war since October 7, 2023, have yielded results that are not quite as alarming, but are nevertheless, variations on the same trend, if not quite the same theme.
And so, much like the demographic crisis of the 1990’s generated a sense of urgency among community leaders and elders, so too is the crisis of youthful Jewish distancing from Israel.
One of the obvious responses to the crisis of 2025 is to mobilize across communities and locations to create deeper connections of world-wide Jewish peoplehood within the younger generation. And the obviously best, though not only, way of creating such deeper connections is through Jewish education.
Against the background of the crisis of Jewish peoplehood 2025, JTA published a report last month that the UJA-Federation New York launched a $15 million, three-year pilot to ease costs for families and Jewish communal workers.
The report stated “that across the country, affordability has become the defining challenge for Jewish day schools, sparking experiments in philanthropy and communal funding.”
New York UJA CEO Eric Goldstein was a bit more couched in his language when he said: “There’s a receptivity to day school education among a broader segment of the community (ie, the non-Orthodox community). “In this moment of opportunity… we’re trying to remove barriers that keep families from choosing a Jewish school.”
In a nicely understated way, the reporter noted that the pilot program aims to relieve “the tension between the desire for Jewish education and the crushing price tag. The report actually refers to the Generations Trust program of the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto as an example of how “federations and foundations are treating tuition relief as a strategy to stem attrition and grow enrollment.”
The Generations Trust program in the GTA is almost five years old. Some four years earlier, in 2017, UJA Federation planners and leaders and local philanthropists helped Tanenbaum CHAT engineer what was, at that time, a revolutionary tuition reduction and freeze initiative. We point to these educational funding innovations because they reflected a more-than-century-old, deeply embedded understanding and embrace of the significance of Jewish education among the Jews of Canada (especially in the GTA and in Montreal, who together comprise more than 75% of Canadian Jewry) as the true generator of life-long attachment to and feeling for Jewish peoplehood.
The events of October 7 and the two years following rocked Jews around the world, including of course, Canadian Jews. But there is no reported evidence of large-scale alienation from the only Jewish State on earth, among teenage Canadian Jews – or indeed among Canadian Jews of any age. Perhaps this is because the historic recognition of the importance of Jewish education and its wide availability, have indeed deeply rooted a sense of Jewish peoplehood here among large numbers of Canadian Jews.
The details of the New York pilot program are contained in the JTA article: https://www.jta.org/2025/09/29/united-states/new-york-becomes-latest-experiment-in-subsidies-for-jewish-day-school-tuition
•••
GAJE’s legal team will appear before the Court of Appeal at 10:00 on November 21, 2025 to argue that the Divisional Court was wrong, in September 2024, to reverse Judge Papageorgiou’s decision of August 2023 that had allowed our case to proceed.
If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com
•••
Shabbat shalom
Am Yisrael Chai
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)
October 17, 2025
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education 