This has been a “heavy” week.
Wednesday (October 7) was a particularly heavy day.
The past three years have been heavy, almost beyond imagining.
The norms of social civility, the shared beliefs in democracy’s pre-eminence, and the paramountcy of morality as the measure of human endeavour, have been and are being ploughed under the fractured foundation stones of our way of life, by the haters of Israel, Jews the West, and their witting and unwitting accomplices.
The British journalist, Melanie Phillips, described these past three years, in her typical, hard-hitting way. “It wasn’t merely that on October 7, 2023 terrible atrocities were perpetrated upon more than 1450 innocent souls in the State of Israel. On that day, a very great evil was unleashed throughout the west, an evil that three years later threatens to consume it altogether.”
She elaborated. “Instead of rising to the support of the Israeli Jews targeted for such genocidal attack, the West turned against them. The atrocities were denied, even though the Hamas terrorists had filmed themselves on their Go-Pro cameras as they went about their infernal business…
“Professing grotesquely to be standing for conscience and compassion, western liberals and their governments declared that Israel – engaged in a desperate war of self-defence against the genocidal war being perpetrated by Hamas and its sponsor Iran – was itself a genocide and that the Israelis were guilty of war crimes.
“Every single part of that libellous and preposterous inversion has been shown to be untrue.”
As a grassroots volunteer organization whose aim is to secure – in perpetuity – the future thriving of the Jewish people through access to affordable education, GAJE understands that there can be no true Jewish future, nor indeed a true Western future, if truth is banished from the sustaining infrastructure of our lives.
For this reason, GAJE shares a statement made by Elisha Wiesel on September 30, 2026, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., about the need to defend truth, at an event honoring what would have been his father, Elie’s, 98th birthday. Specifically, Wiesel urged the museum to publicly decry the falsity of the charge of genocide hurled against Israel.
“Because it is a federal institution,” Wiesel said, “the museum faces constraints that a private citizen like me doesn’t…. But, on one question, the museum has a unique responsibility that it has not yet met.
“Since Oct. 7, 2023, the word “genocide” has been used as a weapon against Israel — on campuses, at the United Nations and by a sitting member of the museum’s own governing council, Sen. Bernie Sanders. The charge is false. Genocide, as defined by the 1948 convention that followed the Holocaust, requires intent to destroy a people as such. Israel has fought a war it did not start against an enemy that sees its own civilians as expendable and openly declares its intent to repeat the atrocities of Oct. 7. The suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is real, and it should trouble everyone; but suffering in war, even terrible suffering, is not genocide. What Israel has done is not genocide but the prevention of genocide.
“This is not a matter of semantics. The genocide charge turns the Jewish state into the new Nazis, and the Jewish People back into a threat to be removed from the family of nations. It inverts the Holocaust. Those who started the accusation knew exactly what they were doing. They knew that the uninformed would spread hate like wildfire.
“The museum’s leaders have spoken as individuals….The institution itself, however, has not spoken. It made its own findings for Darfur, the Yazidis and the Rohingya. It has the scholars, the credibility and the mandate to do the same here: to explain, … why the genocide label does not fit Gaza, and what the misuse of Holocaust language does to Jews around the world… [I]t can surely address a false accusation of genocide against the Jewish state. Declining to join the accusation is not the same as dismantling it, and only the museum can do that.”
Wiesel had no qualms about his task. He determined to conscript the flagship institution in the U.S. with unassailable credibility on the subject, to debunk the lie of genocide hurled each day against the Jewish State.
Wiesel concluded: “My father believed profoundly in the power of words. They could, he said, at times attain the quality of deeds.”
Of course, we applaud Wiesel’s effort to defend truth. His father’s belief in the power of words stems fully from within Judaic teachings. The late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned against the rise and embrace of “alternative facts” within public and private discourse. He characterized it as a threat to humanity. “When people stop believing in objective truth, mutual trust erodes, making it impossible for a free society to function.”
GAJE views defending the truth as part of our mission to try to help bring affordable Jewish education to all parents that seeks it for their children. That defence falls upon us all. Where truth is trampled, the trampling of human life soon follows.
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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
October 9, 2026
