King Charles was absolutely correct when he described his late friend, guide and counsellor, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, as “unmistakably one in the tradition of the greatest teachers among the Jewish people.”

Rabbi Sacks’ insights have often accompanied or, more likely, been the centrepiece of these weekly GAJE missives over the past ten plus years. The vast body of his penetrating and inspiring writings, speeches, broadcasts, discourses and conversations are a source of unending light.

Rabbi Sacks’ commentary on last week’s Torah portion, Bo, first written 19 years ago, and posted anew by The Rabbi Sacks Legacy last week, provides a profoundly apposite insight into the essential role of education in Jewish life and throughout Jewish history. 

Rabbi Sacks entitled the commentary, Freedom’s Defence. He reflects upon the nature of true, authentic, meaningful human freedom and liberty. In doing so, Rabbi Sacks brilliantly places education as freedom’s ultimate defender.

Rabbi Sacks’ insights touch the very heart of GAJE’s mission. GAJE, therefore, provides excerpts from the rabbi’s commentary on the Torah portion, Bo. (Because the passages are so relevant and so pointedly written, we provide more than we might usually. All indications of emphasis are from GAJE.)

•••

“It was the moment for which they had been waiting for more than two hundred years. The Israelites, slaves in Egypt, were about to go free…. And now the time had arrived. The Israelites were on the brink of their release. Moses, their leader, gathered them together and prepared to address them. What would he speak about at this fateful juncture, the birth of a people? 

“[H]e spoke about children, and the distant future, and the duty to pass on memory to generations yet unborn….

“About to gain their freedom, the Israelites were told that they had to become a nation of educators. That is what made Moses not just a great leader, but a unique one. What the Torah is teaching is that freedom is won…in the human imagination and will. To defend a country, you need an army. But to defend a free society, you need schools. You need families and an educational system in which ideals are passed on from one generation to the next, and never lost, or despaired of, or obscured. So, Jews became the people whose passion was education, whose citadels were schools and whose heroes were teachers.

“The result was that by the time the Second Temple was destroyed, Jews had constructed the world’s first system of universal compulsory education, paid for by public funds…

“By contrast, England did not institute universal compulsory education until 1870. The seriousness the Sages attached to education can be measured by the following….

“If a city has made no provision for the education of the young, its inhabitants are placed under a ban, until teachers have been engaged. If they persistently neglect this duty, the city is excommunicated, for the world only survives by the merit of the breath of schoolchildren.

Maimonides, Hilchot Talmud Torah 2:1

“No other faith has attached a higher value to study. None has given it a higher position in the scale of communal priorities.

“What, thanks to Torah, Jews never forgot is that freedom is a never-ending effort of education in which parents, teachers, homes, and schools are all partners in the dialogue between the generations.

“Learning – Talmud Torah – is the very foundation of Judaism, the guardian of our heritage and hope. That is why, when tradition conferred on Moses the greatest honour, it did not call him ‘our hero’, ‘our prophet’ or ‘our king’. It called him, simply, Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher. For it is in the arena of education that the battle for the good society is lost or won.”

•••

Rabbi Sacks provided the perspective that places Jewish education at the very heart of who we are, who we have always been and who we will – must – always be.

GAJE’s mission is to help try to ensure Jewish education is affordably available to Jewish families in perpetuity.

•••

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.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

January 30, 2026

Israel’s former Ambassador to Canada, Alan Baker, and currently the head of the international law programat the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, aptly expressed the frustration and anger of most Jews when he recently wrote: “On a daily basis, we are witnessing a mass-phenomenon of deliberately one-sided accusations being leveled solely against Israel, alleging human rights violations against Palestinians. Slanted social media platforms, once-reputable international media outlets, politically-biased UN bodies and human rights committees, and clearly ignorant show-biz celebrities all unthinkingly accuse Israel of genocide, apartheid, cruelty and disproportionate military actions.”

The frustration and anger have boiled over in a cauldron of seething emotion because we know – and it has been well documented – that the onslaught of anti-Israel invective was planned before October 7 and erupted full bore onto the streets of the Western World on October 8 (2023) before any IDF soldiers had crossed into Gaza to hunt down the murderers and the slaughterers. We also know that the anti-Israel campaign of hatred has been funded and fiendishly orchestrated by, among others, Qatar, Iran, and Turkey.

Coping with our emotions and our fears these past 27 plus months has been the chief preoccupation of Jewish individuals, their families and organizations in every Jewish community around the world. Shlomi Ravid, the founding director of the Center for Jewish Peoplehood Education and the editor of The Peoplehood Papers, offers his own prescription for coping with and even surmounting these difficult days.

Ravid’s path forward “begins with reframing Jewish Peoplehood.” He defines Jewish peoplehood as resting on two interconnected tiers: the constitutive and the operational.

The constitutive tier gives rise to the sense of Jewish collectivity. It is based upon two covenants:

a. the covenant of fate, the idea that all Jews are responsible for one another; and

b. the covenant of destiny, the idea that the Jewish people share a collective mission.

These covenants define what Jewish Peoplehood is and what makes it unique among collective identities.

The operational tier gives rise to concrete communal structures that translate into how to achieve a sense of peoplehood. These include:

• The communal–civilizational enterprise that sustains Jewish life and ensures its future.

• Zionism as the framework for Jewish national expression.

• Pluralism as the method for turning core values into practical and political guidelines.

• Tikkun Olam as the expression of the Jewish commitment to the broader world.

• Jewish education as a collective priority.

Ravid suggests that the operational tier includes other principles as well. But the above-mentioned ones are the core. He wishes to achieve a new and powerful unity within the Jewish people “where most Jews can find common ground.” But first, Ravid reminds us, that there must be “clarity about who we are and what we stand for”.

It is in this regard that we point out Ravid included Jewish education as one of his pre-eminent peoplehood-building principles. We share his analysis on this point. This truth vital. By now, we hope it is also evident.

Ravid’s article can be read at:

How the language of Jewish Peoplehood can move us forward from the current crisis

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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.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

January 23, 2026

In the summer of 2005, two remarkable individuals, Elizabeth and Tony Comper, founded Fighting Antisemitism Together. The organization was known by its acronym FAST.

The Compers were outraged by a series of antisemitic incidents in Toronto and Montreal. Their shock reached its peak with the firebombing, in April 2004, of the library at the United Talmud Torah Jewish Day School in Montreal. And so, they took action.

Some short months later, they founded FAST. But there was a defining feature to the organization that bespoke its abiding insight into the fight against antisemitism and indeed, against all societal hatreds and intolerance. Tony Comper, at that time the president and chief executive officer of BMO Financial Group, explained that feature in an address to the Empire Club in the summer of 2005.

The following is an excerpt from the report in The Canadian Jewish News of the event.

“I am here,” Comper told the hundreds assembled at the Empire Club, “because my wife, Elizabeth, and I believe that in the end, this is a crisis [the rise of anti-Semitism] that must be resolved by non-Jews. That is why we founded FAST… as one way of crying: ‘Enough!’ And why we recruited an all-star cast of non-Jewish Canadian business leaders… to the cause.”

Some of the founding members whom the Compers recruited to FAST were Courtney Pratt, president and chief executive officer of Stelco Inc., Michael J. Sabia, president and chief executive officer of Bell Canada Enterprises and Dominic D’Allesandro, president and chief executive officer of Manulife Financial.

“Comper spoke movingly of his and his wife’s resolve in their campaign against anti-Semitism.

He concluded his remarks by invoking the famous articulation by the late scholar, philosopher Emil Fackenheim, of a 614th commandment, that Jews are forbidden to give Hitler a posthumous victory by shying away from or

“I am here today,” Comper told the hushed and utterly attentive audience, “because I believe that this should not be a lonely battle – as it has so often been, for so many, for so long. And because I believe that this 614th commandment is something we all should be living by.”

FAST’s first educational project, developed in close partnership with the Canadian Jewish Congress, Ontario Region, was a curriculum-based learning program called Choose Your Voice, for use initially in grades 6, 7 and 8 of Ontario schools. A decade later, Choose Your Voice had been used by over two million students in more than 19,000 schools in every province and territory in Canada. FAST won the Canadian Race Relations Foundation Award of Excellence 2010. Indeed, Tony and Elizabeth Comper received numerous honours and awards from educational and human rights organization in Canada, and in Israel, in recognition of their initiative, courage and exemplary goodness.

In his ground-breaking remarks to the Empire Club in June 2005, Comper explained that FAST was no starry-eyed project divorced from the hard realities of the persistent hatred he and Elizabeth were determined to fight. “We realize that this initiative – and for that matter, any others that FAST may undertake – is unlikely to touch the hearts and minds of the real hard-core crowd, the ones who most likely learned their hatred at the parental knee,” Comper said.

 “But it could serve to further marginalize them, which sometimes is the best you can do when dealing with bullies and bigots… First, by stripping them of their potential power base, the people who really don’t know any better; and who, for whatever reasons, haven’t sought out the truth for themselves.

“Second, by going one step further and helping to encourage active opposition to the Jew-haters and racists and assorted other bigots and bullies the moment they start telling their despicable lies or making their ugly, pathetic ‘jokes.’ We believe if the truth can make us free, it should also make us bold.”

 Alas, on June 22, 2014, Elizabeth passed away. Teaching was her calling. Profound compassion and abiding virtue were deeply embedded in her nature. She understood in her bones and was known to say that “the best way of securing the future was by teaching young people today.”

In 2021, FAST merged with the Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (CISA), a scholarly organization that publishes the academic journal Antisemitism Studies.

•••

Writing in Policy Magazine: Canadian Politics and Public Policy, in July 2024,Hon. Kevin Lynch, former Clerk of the Privy Council and vice chair of BMO Financial Group, and Paul Deegan, CEO of Deegan Public Strategies and formerly public affairs executive at BMO and CN, reiterated the Compers’ plea that all of society, not just the Jews, must become engaged in the fight against antisemitism.

In an article entitled, It’s Time for Corporate Canada to Take Action on Antisemitism, they wrote: “….coalitions against antisemitism, with leadership from non-Jewish pillars of the business community, are needed even more today.

“…Canada needs a new forum for Jews and non-Jews to come together to combat this ancient hatred. This is an issue for non-Jews to address, as Comper wisely noted some twenty years ago, and business leadership can be crucial to progress. With the scourge of antisemitism on the rise, it’s time for today’s generation of CEOs to step up and show real leadership and allyship – not just in their own workplaces, but in the broader community – to ensure that the Jewish community feels not just believed, but supported.”

We note, sadly – to emphasize the urgency of the pleas by the late Elizabeth Comper, Tony Comper – and then reinforced 20 years later, i.e., today – by Kevin Lynch and Paul Deegan – that when she resigned her post earlier this year as Canada’s antisemitism envoy, Deborah Lyons told The CJN that over time, she grew “despondent and despairing” over how few Canadians stood up against anti-Jewish hatred. 

It is understood and accepted – or should be – by all sentient, law-abiding people that antisemitism threatens cherished democratic norms and civil society as well as Jews. This is the key lesson that the Compers, their corporate and business colleagues in FAST, Lynch and Deegan attempted to impress upon us all.

Their clarion voices should have been joined, unceasingly, by those of our government leaders of all levels. But we do not hear them. Nor have we heard them since October 7, 2023, except, if at all, as platitudes. Shame.

•••

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.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

January 16, 2026

Gary Rosenblatt, the former publisher and editor-in-chief of The Jewish Week of New York (and other leading Jewish weeklies in the U.S. prior accepting his duties in New York) was the very best of the editors and newsroom leaders of the Jewish media during the heyday of print in North America.

Rosenblatt has retired from the newsroom and from the executive offices of The Jewish Week. But he has not put his pen down. He authors a regular column called Between the Lines that is posted on Substack.

His most recent column, entitled Two Heroes for our Time, was a tribute to Rachel Goldberg-Polin and her husband, Jon Polin. As readers know, their son, Hersh, lost an arm trying to save lives at the Nova Festival on October 7, 2023; was kidnapped into Gaza by Hamas; brutalized and tortured by his captors; then murdered by them along with five other hostages in a tunnel dungeon on August 30, 2024.

Rosenblatt wrote of Rachel and Jon that they display a level of faith, courage and resilience that still inspires millions. How very true. We marvel at their remarkable strength, goodness and purpose of character.

It is also true that Rosenblatt’s tribute to them is itself inspiring and worthy of reading. It can be found at: (https://garyrosenblatt.substack.com/p/two-heroes-for-our-time?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F34ad7e5c-4c84-4a93-b4f2-5104518c49f8_640x460.jpeg&open=false).

The following is an excerpt from Rosenblatt’s column. It is heartbreaking and enraging.

“We are living in a season of trauma that began in Israel on October 7 that has not gone away. On the contrary, as the war went on and Israel became an international pariah, expressions of antisemitism have increased around the world, from university campuses in the U.S., to violent attacks against Jews in Europe to the murder of innocent men, women and children celebrating Chanukah on a lovely beach in Australia.

“One of the great frustrations for supporters of Israel is trying to change the minds of Hamas supporters in this country who embrace liberal values even as they defend a terrorist group dedicated to killing Jews and destroying the Jewish state. The most disheartening example I know of comes from Jon Polin, husband of Rachel Goldberg-Polin and father of Hersh, a”h, probably the most well-known of the hostages abducted to Gaza on October 7.

“Jon shared the story with journalist Abigail Pogrebin, who moderated a poignant conversation with Rachel and Jon at the recent JOFA (Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance) conference in New York. He told the large, spellbound audience that during a rare few days of solitude last summer, he and Rachel visited a close friend in a small town in Oregon. One morning they went to a local coffee shop and noticed that the barista was wearing a “from the river to sea” button. Rachel cautioned Jon not to bother getting into a conversation with the young man. Jon didn’t, but their host did engage the barista, leading to an argument.

“After a few moments, Rachel walked over, put her hand out to the barista, asked him his name – Jake – and showed him a picture on her phone of Hersh. She explained, as she held Jake’s hand, that Hersh was her 23-year-old son, an advocate for peace and co-existence, who was one of six Israelis murdered by Hamas in a tunnel after being starved and tortured for almost 10 months.

“Jake’s reaction was immediate. “Well, you guys are committing genocide,” he said angrily.

“So much for compassion.”

•••

We bring readers’ attention to Rosenblatt’s column not because of its tender eloquence regarding Rachel and Jon. Rather, we do because the column indirectly proves the urgency of the need to teach our children the truth of Israel’s history. It is disheartening that so many people, shamefully, without any knowledge of the past or even an interest in knowing the past, so willingly spread lies about Israel, Jews and Judaism.

The antidote to the vilification wrought by ignorance and malign intent is the dissemination and constant restatement of truth.

Teaching this truth to our children means enabling their access to Jewish education.

•••

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.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

January 9, 2026

In one of the key climactic scenes toward the end of The Sound of Music currently playing in Toronto, before the von Trapp family singers emerge onto the imagined stage of the Kaltzberg Concert Hall, five floor to ceiling curtain panels of crimson red bunting drop with sudden intrusive force as the backdrop to the upcoming scene. At the centre of each of the panels is a white circle in which the thick black arms of the crooked swastika reach to the edge of the circle’s circumference.

Even as theatre, the full, frontal, in-one’s-face view of the five large swastikas is shocking. For those of us for whom the swastika holds direct, personal family references, the sight of the unfurled symbols of evil sent a shuddering frisson of anger and rage through the heart. One hopes the symbols evoked a strong, if not quite similar reaction in most of the theatre goers of a certain age that day.

That we saw this performance merely four days after a howling throng of mostly masked thugs shouting for “intifadah right now” set upon The Eaton Centre in downtown Toronto, undoubtedly boosted the emotional response at the sight of the swastikas on stage. For, in truth, what is the essence of the message that urges intifadah, if not the celebration of and a call to repeat the Nazis’ genocide of European Jewry?

Pro-Hamas ruffians and haters would refuse us the right to live in Canada. Indeed, more truthfully, they probably would refuse us the right to live. Period.

If our society’s civic leaders do not actively, substantively – not merely rhetorically – oppose the thugs, then those very leaders are effectively allowing the society, that they purport to steward, to be unmistakably diminished. At what point will the protections against being victimized by hate, that are embedded in our laws, be so hollowed out by overt political hypocrisy and unembarrassed lack of use, as to cripple those protections altogether?

Do our elected leaders no longer stand for the safekeeping of our laws-based democracy?

Do they no longer stand for the protection of the Jewish community within our democracy?

Earlier this week, The Canadian Jewish News reported that Ontario’s Solicitor General, Michael Kerzner, “publicly call[ed] out Toronto police handling of ‘unacceptable’ anti-Israel protests.”

Kerzner told the paper: “What prompted my letter today to the chief of police and to the police service board was two years worth of harassment, intimidation, and hate that’s been directed to not only the Jewish community, but to law-abiding citizens of Ontario that make up the 99.99 per cent of the population that simply wants to go about their lives and live safely in their own homes and communities.”

GAJE commends the Solicitor General.

But all of us have a role to play in fighting back against the haters and proponents of intifada. Our role, as parents and as grandparents, is to equip our children with the knowledge of what it means to belong to our remarkable ancient/modern people.

In his commentary on this week’s Torah portion, Vayechi, Rabbi Marc D. Angel, of New York explains why: “Our continuity as a people is inextricably linked to our historical memory. We bring the past into the present; we project the present into the future. This is one of the great responsibilities of Jewish parents and grandparents—to imbue the younger generations with a sense of belonging to, and participating in, the history of our people.

“This is also one of our great privileges and a source of our deepest fulfillment as Jews.”

In other words, it falls to all of us to bring Jewish education to our children, so that they will want to – and know how – to bring themselves, in time, to the Jewish people.

•••

The CJN article is available at: https://thecjn.ca/news/ontarios-solicitor-general-publicly-calls-out-toronto-police-handling-of-unacceptable-anti-israel-protests/

•••

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.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

January 2, 2026

Winter is now fully upon us. Cold winds blow across the wide, climatic landscape of 2025, causing us to buckle up against the chill. They also blow cold societally, causing Jews in particular, to do the same against a chill that cuts far deeper.

This update is the last of 2025. If the word “positive” can be applied to increments of very small measures, then 2025 was, indeed, positive for the advancement of GAJE’s mission. But ours is still a work in progress.

In February, GAJE was granted leave to appeal the decision by the Divisional Court some four months earlier, that had accepted Ontario’s arguments against allowing our case to proceed and threw it out of court. On November 21, the Court of Appeal heard the appeal. We await the Court’s decision.

If our appeal succeeds, GAJE will have won the right to argue the merits of our case in court. It bears repeating that we launched our original application for fairness in Ontario’s educational funding in February 2022. In August of 2023, Judge Papageorgiou ruled that our case should proceed to a full hearing on its merits.

And so, we wait, and hope, for a good result from the Court of Appeal.

GAJE was founded in April of 2015. We are patient and we are determined to carry the flag of our cause high, proudly and with deep historical purpose. We will do so until there are no longer any reasonable legal avenues for GAJE to try to advance the cause. This is a promise by GAJE to the Jewish community: to all the generations of our people present, future and past too. To our children and grandchildren. And to our ancestors, whose ways, beliefs, heritage, traditions and love taught us that we must cherish and defend what is true and precious for all eternity: Jewish peoplehood.

•••

Last week’s update contained a short paragraph that was written by the New York-based educator and scholar, Mijal Bitton. It began: “And with that grief came a familiar fear…” However, due to a lack of attention, her authorship was not attributed. We apologize for the oversight. An author’s work must always be acknowledged.

•••

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.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Happy, healthy new year

Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

December 26, 2025

The fact that Chanukah is an eight-day festival allows us, in this weekly “update”, to convey an additional holiday-related reflection to that in the update last week.

And because of the massacre at Bondi Beach, it is important not to let this opportunity pass without comment, without restating the obvious tie between the horrific Bondi event, Chanukah and the mission of Jews throughout the world, today, yesterday, tomorrow, always.

And with that grief came a familiar fear, one Jews have learned to recognize across generations: would Jewish life retreat, once again, into the shadows?

And yet, what followed was not retreat.

The editor of the Sapir Journal succinctly defined our – Jews – responsibility in responding to the craven cruelties of those who seek our harm.

“These hateful acts remind us that Jewish life across the planet has often been perilous, and that its continued survival is a miracle. Our responsibility as Jews is to keep lighting, night after night, no matter how dark the world gets.”

The second blessing of the lighting of the Chanukah candles is tightly-worded re-statement of the Sapir editorialist’s observation concerning the miracle of Jewish survival. We thank the Almighty “Who wrought miracles…. for our ancestors in those days, at this time.”

It is our duty to be ever thankful and to show gratitude for the remarkable inheritance and splendour of our Jewish lives. But it is also our duty to follow the instruction of our ancient Sages not to rely upon miracles.

Apart from the rare moments in Jewish history when the very rules of Nature were upended or suspended, as in the Exodus from Egypt, the “actual” miracles of Jewish life are the result of   human “partnership” with God. It is our behaviour, our action, our resolve – in step with the moral imperatives of ethical, purposeful life ordained by the God of our history, our present and our future – that are the true miracles of Jewish survival and history. The editor of the Sapir Journal prescribed the Jewish response to terror aimed at us is unabating Jewish presence. At Chanukah, that means to “keep lighting the candles”.

Some people might regard such a public, in-your-face response as adding to peril, as counter-intuitive. But counter-intuition has always been the Jewish message to those who are intent on harming Jews, on spreading their hatred for Judaism. And as Chanukah reminds us, Jews have never cowered from in-you-face manifestations of the few against the many. Our courage to do the counter-intuitive, indeed, our strength, flow from our peoplehood and the life-affirming values in which it has been nurtured and nourished from the very beginning.

GAJE’s mission is to try to bring as many children as possible – through affordable Jewish education – to the discovery of their unique, history-changing people and peoplehood.

•••

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.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Chanukah Samayach

Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

December 19, 2025

As we have occasionally noted in this space, the various assaults against Jews and Jewish sensibilities since “October 7” have ignited new interest among many parents throughout North America to provide Jewish education for their children. At the same time, local educators, planners and philanthropists, have been seeking ways to accommodate the increased demand for spaces in their respective community day schools.

The latest story attesting to the ongoing buzz about the importance of Jewish education appeared on the eJP website this week. Entitled, Jewish Education is Too Important to Sit This One Out, the article ostensibly brings American readers’ attention to a new tax-related development there that has the potential to benefit parents wishing to enrol their children in day school. But the article’s underlying premise, and the reason GAJE points to it, is the incontrovertibility of the proposition that intense Jewish education is vital for helping raise knowledgeable, confident, proud Jews.

The article was co-written by three heads of school. At the center of the op-ed is the operative mission whose truth has been frequently and piercingly re-affirmed these past 26 months: “Jewish education is central to our identity, our resilience and our future.”

In these past two years of disgust and consternation with the odious behaviours aimed at Jews, it is very difficult to disagree with this proposition.

In just two days, on Sunday night, families will begin the paradigmatic, eight-day celebration of Jewish identity and resilience: Chanukah. And like all our holidays – but one – so much of its details and celebratory features are geared to capturing and holding the attention and the enjoyment of our children. Building in them positive memories.

Lighting candles on the Chanukah menorah; enjoying traditional, cooking oil-related and mostly deliciously indulgent foods that Jewish families have carried through millennia from Diasporah communities to the State of Israel; dreidling; and distributing chocolate coins to commemorate restored Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel wrought by the Maccabees some 2,200 years ago.

May the glow from the candles that Jewish families all over the world will light during this darkest time of the year (in the northern hemisphere) be an enduring metaphor reminding us of the evanescence of dark times, and more importantly, inspiring us to be the light.

•••

The article is available at:

Jewish education is too important to sit this one out

•••

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.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Chanukah Samayach

Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

December 12, 2025

Adam Hummel is a thoughtful, articulate, bold firebrand on behalf of the Jewish people and just causes. He writes a regular column, Catch, on Substack. We have occasionally brought his ideas to the attention of readers of this weekly update. Today we do so again.

Earlier this week, Hummel published an essay aimed at rallying urgent community action to what he describes as an unfolding crisis for young Jewish parents in Toronto: the insufficient supply of spaces in day school for the increasing demand by Jewish parents.

The article is entitled We Can’t Turn Jewish Kids Away.

“Families are choosing Jewish education in numbers we have not seen in decades,” Hummel writes. “Parents who once wavered are now decisive. People who never imagined day school are walking in and asking how soon they can start. The demand is real, and it is inspiring. Unfortunately, many are now being placed on wait lists.”

Hummel elaborates. “…October 7 happened, and the outside community’s relationship with Jewish identity, Jewish safety, and Jewish continuity changed literally overnight. The toxicity in the public-school boards showed parents and students what their teachers and colleagues really thought. Maybe day school could, now be, an option? Our day schools rose to the occasion. 

Suddenly, the limiting factor wasn’t tuition. It was physical room.”

“[T]his moment is not a blip,” he writes. “It is not a fad. It is not a panicked reaction. It is an awakening. Jewish parents are choosing Jewish schools because the case for Jewish education has never been stronger, never been clearer, and never been more empirically supported.”

Hummel accuses no-one for the apparent shortage in classrooms. Indeed, he praises the community decision makers and institutions for responding as quickly as possible to the unforeseen surg born of unprecedented menace to Jews around the world.

“Federation, board members, donors, and school administrators have all been scrambling to assess the scale of this moment and determine what is needed not just now, but ten and fifteen years from now. They are trying to ensure that new builds are adaptable, flexible, and sustainable, especially given past closures, relocations, and the understandable nervousness that comes with committing tens of millions of dollars to long-term infrastructure.”

Hummel pleads with us to “think big” and tells us what he means by “big”.

“This…is an emergency. It is one grounded in hope though, rather than fear. Perhaps, that distinction motivates something different in our subconscious or desire to reach for our wallets and chequebooks, but if ever there was a moment that called for bold investment, it is now. 

“This is not a Jewish guilt trip. This is an invitation to take part in something generational. …The moment demands … a communal mindset that sees Jewish education not as a personal project, but as a collective responsibility. Every Jewish child deserves a seat,”

GAJE agrees with Hummel.

Indeed, so does the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto and its educational umbrella infrastructure. New classes were opened last year in some schools and in some synagogues to accommodate increased demand for places. There are undoubtedly plans for more in the months to come.

Hummel urges that the response to these difficult times should be far-seeing, building for all tomorrows the truest infrastructure for permanent, proud Jewish life: a comprehensive educational system.

“No child should be denied a Jewish education” has been the guiding mission of UJA Federation and its predecessor organizations from the very first day, more than a century ago, when Jewish men and women banded together to create the core planning and sustaining structures of our community life.

The late educator, historian Michael Brown would remind his students that the future has not yet been written. It falls to us in the present, each day, every day, as we are able, to take up the metaphorical pen and write the future as we must, in partnership with Heaven, to help ensure the perpetuity of our people that has always been our belief. 

Hummel calls us to act in the single most effective way to enable us to affirm our peoplehood against those who strive to erase it. We must raise Jews.

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Hummel’s op-ed can be read at:

https://catchjcp.substack.com/p/we-cant-turn-jewish-kids-away?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1033775&post_id=180042701&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=rvbar&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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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 doing so.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

December 5, 2025

Last week, the Court of Appeal heard GAJE’s appeal of the September 2024 decision of the Divisional Court that threw our case out of court, reversing the decision of Judge Eugenia Papageorgiou the year before in August 2023, that had determined our application should proceed to a full hearing on its merits.

The Court of Appeal consisted of three judges: Eileen Gillesse, Sarah Pepall and Lois Roberts. The judges were engaged throughout the hearing, asking clarifying questions of both sides.

Our legal team – Jillian Siskind and Lawrence Greenspon – was superb. They established an excellent rapport with the judges from the very outset, speaking confidently in command of the material and respectfully in responding to the judges’ questions.

Our lawyers divided their arguments into two parts. The first was more overarching, explaining the full theory and legal basis of our appeal and emphasizing that GAJE was not seeking a ruling at this time on the merits of our request to have the Adler decision of 1996 reassessed. The team meticulously explained that the material they had filed and on which they presented argument was intended to show that there were sufficient legal and societal developments since Adler was decided, nearly 30 years ago, to trigger the test that would warrant sending our application to a hearing on the merits. The team emphasized the principle that the Constitution of Canada is a “living tree” that must not be frozen in time.

The second part of the GAJE presentation presented the legal developments and the societal changes since 1996. These post-1996 developments were instrumental, our lawyers stated, in justifying a new examination by the courts at how the Charter of Rights and Freedoms might be applied to them in 2025. Indeed, in her decision of 2023, Judge Papageorgiou did precisely that. She gathered into one basket, all of the new legal and societal developments since 1996 and determined their cumulative impact did warrant a fresh look at the constitutional issues that GAJE had brought for adjudication.

In response to GAJE’s arguments, the government lawyers made the very same arguments that they have since the very beginning, although last week a bit more volubly. The Adler case has decided the matter, they proclaimed. There is nothing new in our application, they maintained. The GAJE material, they said, provides no new evidence that “fundamentally changes the parameters of the legal debate.” He emphasized the word “fundamentally” as the key requirement of the legal principle that must be satisfied to trigger the application of the rule allowing a hearing to argue for the reassessment of the 1996 decision. At one point in response to a question from one of the judges, the government summarized his view of our case in starkly absolute terms: “Zero plus zero plus zero equals zero.” 

GAJE’s legal team was powerful in reply to the government’s arguments. They held the attention of the three judges and continued to steer them to reflecting upon the context of the original 1867 “historical compromise” that resulted in the S. 30 enshrinement in the Constitution of Canada of the mutual minority protections – by means of the respective educational systems – in Quebec and Ontario at that time. The team urged the judges to view the S. 30 protection for what it was intended to achieve then, and how those circumstances some 150 years ago, should not prevent the application of the equality and freedom of religion provisions of the Charter from being applied in educational matters today. This is especially so because reconsidering the application of our Charter rights today, some 30 years after Adler, would not negatively affect the Catholic community in Ontario.

The Court reserved its decision. Once it is handed down, GAJE will share it at our first opportunity. If the ruling is positive, GAJE gains the opportunity to present our full case, at long last. Let us hope.

GAJE is very proud of and grateful to our legal team.

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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  Thank you, in advance, for doing so.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

November 28, 2025