From the end of summer days in early September to the beginning of summer days in late June, our youngsters and their teachers have engaged in what the late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called “the passion of study and the life of the mind.”
To be sure, most of our students might not define their almost 10-month occupation in learning-how-to-read, learning-how-to-count, learning-how-to-think, books, homework, school projects, pressures and pleasures, as Rabbi Sacks did. Indeed, teachers too, might find different words to describe the responsibilities they fulfilled each day toward their young charges and their colleagues. But in broad collective sum, across the millennial span of time and varied geographies, Rabbi Sacks was perfect in his depiction of the stretched-out activity that teachers and their students have just completed for academic 2025/2026 (5785/5786).
Attending school each day for some 10 months – whether as students or as teachers – is not easy. In fact, it is often a grind. And so, GAJE congratulates our students and thanks their teachers and their support staff in bringing education to our children.
In equal fact, we need to also acknowledge – as we have before – that these past three years, have shone an enhanced light on the urgency of the need for Jewish education.
Jewish education, more than ever, is “a steel-hard, uncompromising response to the aggression against Jewish communities around the world. Families that send their children to Jewish school affirm, with the clear-eyed resolve of the ancient Hebrew prophets, the inviolability of our promise to our forebears and to God, that we will live Jewish lives.”
Our gratitude to those who engage in the enterprise of Jewish education is thus sharper and deserves to be expressed without hesitation, in the hope that our children, in time, will choose the same for their children.
In the GAJE update of the last Friday of the school year, we have often reproduced the following definitive characterization by Rabbi Sacks coupling the Jewish people with life-long education. We do so again. It is that important.
“For Jews, education is not just what we know. It’s who we are. No people ever cared for education more. Our ancestors were the first to make education a religious command, and the first to create a compulsory universal system of schooling – eighteen centuries before Britain… the Egyptians built pyramids, the Greeks built temples, and the Romans built amphitheaters, Jews built schools. They knew that to defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education. So, Jews became the people whose heroes were teachers, whose citadels were schools, and whose passion was study and the life of the mind.”
To all of our students: Congratulations. Well done.
To their teachers and “helpers’ at all levels: You are our heroes.
Thank you, all, very much.
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If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit to achieve fairness in educational funding, 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 Thank you, in advance, for considering doing so.
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Shabbat shalom
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education
June 26, 2026
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education 