Last week, we reported the direct, forthright messages from scholars and writers Haviv Rettig Gur and Prof. Coleman Hughes to campus-aged youngsters and their parents on how to confront the “social contagion” of brute antisemitism at universities and colleges today. They delivered, essentially, the same message to the hundreds in attendance at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal-hosted gathering in Toronto.

Gur urged us “to learn, teach and tell the story of the Jewish people”. Prof. Hughes urged students to know “who they are” to thereby enable themselves to “stand up for their values”. Both men acknowledged the difficulties involved in implementing their prescriptions.

We have all observed, over the past two and a half years, how the intimidation and bullying aimed at Jews and supporters of Israel have so poisoned the climate on some campuses that civility, respect and tolerance no longer grow there. Our children too frequently must confront the bent and crooked outcroppings of hatred. This is the world, today, in which, we earnestly, hope they will grow, develop and mature, nevertheless.

Many scholars, community workers, historians and other interested observers have begun to write on the subject of how our children might find the wherewithal to implement the ‘Gur-Hughes prescriptions’, that is, how to stand Jewishly tall in a landscape of “social contagion”.

For example, Michael Gencher, executive director of StandWithUs Australia, recently published an essay on eJP entitled Before resilience comes pride, in which he asks: “What helps when a Jewish young person is confronted by hostility, ignorance or the steady drip of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist messaging? …What works is a young person who already knows that being Jewish is something good, something deep and something worth holding onto.”

Gencher’s reflections rush to the difficult questions. “What helps when a Jewish young person is confronted by hostility, ignorance or the steady drip of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist messaging?

…What works is a young person who already knows that being Jewish is something good, something deep and something worth holding onto.”

Gencher understands that many young Jews are not raised with a deep familiarity of Jewish peoplehood. But he writes: “It is never too late. Pride can still be built. Identity can still be strengthened. A young Jew who did not receive that grounding at home can still find it through mentors, education, friendships, community and meaningful Jewish experiences. If we want resilient Jewish young people, then first we have to build proud Jewish young people. Not merely informed. Not merely prepared. Proud. Because the real test is not whether they can recite the right answer when challenged. It is whether they know who they are before anyone else tries to define them.”

It warrants emphasizing that “standing up” against the loud and boisterous spreaders of hate is not easy. But it also warrants emphasizing: this is the need of this hour in our history.

Gencher’s essay can be found at:

Before resilience comes pride

•••

In his memoir, Hostage, Eli Sharabi, recounts a conversation with Ori Danino and Hersh Goldberg-Polin after the latter two were confined, for a brief time, with Sharabi.

“Everyone is struggling. On our second day here, someone sighs, and Ori looks at him and says to Hersh, “Hersh, tell them the sentence you kept telling me back at the house.”

“What sentence?” we ask.

“Tell them,” says Ori.

“Hersh looks at us. “He who has a why can bear any how,” he says.”

“I mull it over. The saying feels like a gift.”

(Hersh, of course, was familiar with Victor Frankl’s teachings, for he had quoted the core philosophy in Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl’s seminal work. Perhaps, posthumously, through his restatement of “the sentence”, Hersh might also provide a similar gift of inspiration to our countless children contending with their own, very different, struggles.)

•••

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)

May 15, 2026

It has always been true that “there is strength in numbers”. The phrase is used so often that it has become a cliché. Except as it pertains to the Jewish people. We have simply never had the numbers. Indeed, our tradition teaches that we are, and have always been, “the few against the many”.

The source of our strength, therefore, derives elsewhere, not from our numbers. Rather, the source of our strength rises and surges from the values, and collective sense of common history and covenantal purpose that have enfolded our people since we exited slavery some 3,500 years ago. This is a foundational statement.

We must frequently restate and return to it as the first principle of defence against the haters intending to harm Jews and to brazenly erase, bit by bit, Jewish history from its essential place in modern history and in the development of modern Western society.

At a program in Toronto, earlier this week, entitled Voices of Change, hosted by Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, Haviv Rettig Gur and Coleman Hughes articulated variations of this foundational statement when the discussion inevitably turned to the ubiquity and the virulence of antisemitism on campus.

Gur, the Israeli journalist and scholar, urged the Jewish members of the audience – across the generations who were in attendance – “to learn, teach and tell the story of the Jewish people”. He meant not only to one another but to the broader society as well. For the story of the Jewish people is the story of the evolution of the values that underpin civil, humane, democratic society. Gur pleaded with the audience to fight for Canada, because, as he so eloquently framed it, is one and the same fight against antisemitism.

Prof. Hughes, the American teacher and scholar, developed a further aspect to the call for prospective university students to know “who they are”. Prof. Hughes described many campuses these days as being “awash with social contagion.” However challenging, difficult, and even isolating for students to try to resist and turn back the contagion, Prof. Hughes pointedly suggested that “standing up for one’s values….is also a personal opportunity.”

“Embrace it,” he said, knowing that his prescription is not always easy to absorb. “This will be a step toward personal growth, maturity and development.”

Gur and Hughes, without ambiguity, in their own respective ways, firmly proclaimed, to members of our community, the same battlement cry required to fight the conspiracists who froth and flaunt their hatred of Jews. The ability, resilience and strength to fight antisemitism on campus derives from Jewish self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-confidence.

This formula – as we know – is not new. What is new is the extent and the nature of the phenomenon that Huges called “a social contagion”.

In fact, the Gur – Hughes formula echoed a cri de coeur from Alan Baker, Israel’s ambassador to Canada more than two decades ago, in 2005, in an interview with the Canadian Jewish News.

The foremost concern Ambassador Baker expressed for North American Jewry was over the troubling situation on campus.

“The campus is where our future leaders, in the Jewish and broader communities, are molded.

Yet there are concerted activities by certain Islamic and even Christian organizations there to push an anti-Israel agenda to try to influence the minds of our youth. Our community leaders must invest whatever resources are necessary to counter this campaign.”

Speaking emphatically, the British-born diplomat added, “Having been raised outside Israel, I appreciate the importance of a strong Jewish community using its resources to develop and maintain itself. For support of Israel to be strong, there has to be a strong local Jewish community.”

“Each community has an obligation to its own future. It must ensure education in Judaism and about Israel is given to every child. That [Jewish] education must be widely available and effective.”

Ambassador Baker’s message 21 years ago is the eternal message of Jewish survival: Education.

It is also GAJE’s message.

•••

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)

May 8, 2026

Jews, as well as law-respecting and democracy-cherishing individuals throughout the western world were not surprised by the fact of the anti-Israel-pro-Hamas demonstrations on October 8, 2023. We were, however, surprised and increasingly appalled at the nature of those demonstrations, how trans-border-organized they were, how sizable the numbers, how uniform the signage and especially how brazenly unembarrassed and shameless were the chanters breathlessly urging upon the world, the elimination of the State of Israel and of its Jews. (“From the river to the sea….”).

Our feelings of surprise intensified. For, after those first ugly days, the haters, marchers and chanters grew more voluble delivering their vile message, bolder in their tactics, and more audacious in their aspirations for violence. We need not examine the reasons why this was so. We need only observe, without reservation, that the abject failure of western governments – including that of Canada – through silence, or pro forma, banal, substance-less condemnations – “This is not who we are.” – have effectively encouraged the haters to become more aggressive in trying to achieve their malevolent aims. The constant demonization of the State of Israel has led inexorably to the intimidation, harassment, bullying and attempted harming of Jews. Here in Canada.

Now, when the demonizers target our communal way of life and our religion, we are no longer surprised. We are angry and determined.

Earlier this week B’nai Brith Canada issued a press release calling attention to the campaign by the anti-Israel-pro-Hamas champions to have the Government of Canada revoke the charitable status of our Jewish schools because the schools teach our children about the State of Israel.

It is not overstatement to write that seeking to remove the charitable status of our schools is to seek their demise. Seeking the demise of our schools is effectively to seek the demise of the keystone of our communal way of life: Jewish education.

This new, malign reach by the haters is aimed at erasing Jewish life here, in our society. That may sound overstated but it is not. There can be no truthful, meaningful Jewish education in Jewish schools that does not rest on the core, foundational triad of “The faith of Israel. The Land of Israel. The people of Israel” The education of which we write is not about learning to be “religious”. It is about cherishing our history, traditions, culture, and sense of peoplehood.

“Eliminating the charitable status of these schools on these grounds would give credence to an antisemitic double standard and infringe on the right of thousands of Jewish youths to a Jewish education rooted in their system of beliefs,” Richard Robertson, B’nai Brith Canada’s Director of Research and Advocacy, pointed out.

Robertson noted that the campaign attempts to weaponize Canadian charity law and appears to be part of a concerted effort to “villainize” Jewish institutions. He reminded us that the singling out of Jewish schools comes on the heels of a previous effort by the same groups to discredit and defund certain Jewish summer camps that have Israel-related programming. Such campaigns “demonize” Zionism and Zionists, prejudicing Canadian Jews, the vast majority of whom believe in the right of the State of Israel to exist.

Robertson also noted that some of the groups associated with the campaign are known to promote or celebrate acts of terror targeting Israelis or Jews and said they cannot be treated as credible or moral actors. They are engaged in what he describes as “sustained, intentional and organized targeting” of Canada’s Jewish community.

In this latter observation, Robertson echoed Simon Wolle, B’nai Brith Canada’s Chief Executive Officer, who stated: “This is not an isolated issue or campaign. It is a coordinated and malicious attack on Jewish life extending from sector to sector and charity to charity.”

We commend B’nai Brith Canada for shining public light on this dark, new development.

This is our fight. All of us. We must convey our outrage to our federal representatives and demand response that prevents the attacks on Jews and on Jewish life.

***

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)

May 1, 2026

As readers of this weekly update know, the Court of Appeal, in February, decided that GAJE’s case did not warrant proceeding in court to a full hearing on its merits. The Court agreed with the Government of Ontario that the issues raised in our application had already and definitively been decided in 1996 by the Supreme Court in the Adler case. It therefore threw out our application.

Intent on pursuing every legal avenue to obtain a full hearing for our case, GAJE recently filed an application comprising more than 100 pages, with the Supreme Court, for leave to appeal the decision by the Court of Appeal.

The following are a few short excerpts from the concluding sections of the application GAJE filed with the court. We wish supporters to know the nature and purpose of our plea.

•••

• “The Adler case was decided thirty years ago….While Adler was based on caselaw and legal principles that existed in 1996, the decision is no longer an accurate reflection of the changes in the law, the evolution of Charter values, and Canadian society at large. The social considerations animating the decision are no longer relevant. Notably, even the Adler court was sharply divided.

• In Adler, this Court was concerned about the historical compromise at Confederation between Upper and Lower Canada. A year later, Quebec then exited this compromise through a constitutional amendment, which became section 93A, such that Quebec would no longer fund its Protestant schools while Ontario continued its constitutional obligation to fund its Catholic schools.

• The Court in Adler was concerned about the impact of funding of public schools if funding was extended to Jewish day schools, however, the evidence demonstrates that in the provinces that now fund independent schools (Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Colombia), the public school systems remain healthy.

• …Since the Adler decision, the courts have recognized the duty of state neutrality and the principle of conformity with international law has been firmly entrenched. These concepts ought to inform and enlighten the interpretation of Ontario’s education funding obligations in order to end its discriminatory funding model.

• Section 93 of the Constitution Act does not need to be, and should not be, interpreted as the Adler court interpreted it. Section 93(3) allows for Ontario to make decisions in relation to the funding of other denominational schools. Thus, in light of the advancements resulting from s. 2 and 15 of the Charter, Ontario’s decision not to fund other schools ought to be subject to Charter scrutiny and yield to Charter challenge.

• This Court found … that the absence or failure to legislate can found a Charter breach. The Charter is offended not only by positive acts, but also by failure to act to address an inequality. Ontario is failing to address the inequality created by its refusal to extend funding to Jewish day schools equal to that extended to Roman Catholic schools. The proposed fresh evidence makes it clear that Jewish students are at risk in Ontario’s non-Jewish schools. Inequality of funding, combined with rampant antisemitism, results, as the Court of Appeal accepted, in real challenges to the long-term survival of the Jewish community. This result should not be blindly accepted solely because of discussions that were had between Upper and Lower Canada in 1867.

• As the majority explained in Adler at paragraph 48,

   One thing should, however, be made clear. The province remains free to exercise its plenary power with regard to education in whatever way it sees fit, subject to the restrictions relating to separate schools imposed by s.93(1). Section 93 grants to the province of Ontario the power to legislate with regard to public schools and separate schools. However, nothing in these reasons should be taken to mean that the province’s legislative power is limited to these two school systems. In other words, the province could, if it so chose, pass legislation extending funding to denominational schools other than Roman Catholic schools without infringing the rights guaranteed to Roman Catholic separate schools under s. 93(1). (Our emphasis)

• Considering the shift in societal values and the doctrine of state neutrality, and in light of the recognition by this Court … that a Charter breach can come from the absence of legislation, the continued failure of the Ontario government to provide funding for Jewish day schools equal to that of Roman Catholic schools, perpetuates a prima facie act of preference for one religious group over all others at a time when this should no longer be acceptable.

• The Application does not ask for sections 2(a) or 15 of the Charter to enlarge the protection in section 93 of the Constitution. Rather, it questions the continuation of an exclusive and historical discriminatory funding model from 1867, when it does not need to be interpreted this way in 2026. With today’s values, the funding scheme in the Education Act ought to be interpreted in light of the advancements in the law and society present today in order to end the discrimination in education funding perpetuated by Ontario.

• Several of the key issues raised in this Application were never raised nor decided upon by the Court. ….. in Adler, therefore, Adler cannot be an authority for those issues…

• It is submitted that it is important to the public of Ontario to consider whether section 93 should still operate as a sealed, impenetrable, locked iron door preventing even the most fundamental of Charterrights from applying to the people of Ontario. The reasoning set out in Adler is obsolete. The public interest demands that it be tested against the new reality.

•••

If the Supreme Court grants GAJE the right to appeal the decision of the Court of Appeal, our case stays alive. We are hopeful.

***

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)

April 24, 2026

In the mid-1970’s Jews in North America, across all generations, were vibrant, alive, seemingly electric with activism, purpose and conviction on behalf of the permanence and security of Jewish life wherever situate.

Jews around the world shuddered with fear in May 1967. That nearly eviscerating fright was evoked by the blood-curdling threats by Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser and his fellow Arab League strongmen – all of whom were encouraged and supported by the Soviet Union – of slaughter, murder and destruction of the 19-year-old Jewish State of Israel. The fear we felt then was neither ill-founded nor exaggerated. The threats against the young State were unceasing. Each day Arab governments promised increasingly violent atrocity against the Jews of Israel. How could a population of 2.5 million Jews withstand an onslaught from the military forces of the 100 million people in Arab world?

But as we know, the tiny Jewish State, on June 5, 1967, pre-empted the onslaught and won what would become known as The Six Day War. In vanquishing the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and their confederates, Israel breathed drama, currency and modern relevance into the words of the Psalmist: “We shall not die; because we shall live!”

The near universal activism in the mid-1970s by Jews for the sake of other Jews, was in large measure an existential sigh of relief in response to the horrible feeling of vulnerability and imminent catastrophe that had swept through our hearts only a few short years prior. In a sense, it was a collective taking of responsibility one for the other.

In the words of Daniel Held, Chief Program Officer of UJA Federation of Greater Toronto that we published in this space last week, countless Jews in those days “stood tall and proud as Jews” in massive campaigns proclaiming everywhere to the world that henceforth, we will defend Jews, Jewish life, Jewish history, Jewish dignity and Truth itself.

During the mid-70s, the campaign in support of the struggle of Soviet Jews for their freedom typified the newly invigorated imperative of the collective taking of responsibility one for the other. Despite the long odds against the cause, communities of Jews across the world persevered. Non-Jews of conscience and good will joined in the effort. There was no giving up.

That same sense of a united, collective responsibility and purpose is much in need today as Jewish communities across the West confront the alarming growth in the manifestations of hatred of Jews and of Israel. The propagators of this newly rising, shameless hatred are deliberate about their intentions to wipe away from the Holy Texts and libraries of knowledge and scholarship, all evidence of a Jewish past and a Jewish present that stake a claim to the Land of Israel. But we must not let them.

In the coming days and weeks, Jews around the world will be celebrating three epochal events of the modern Jewish calendar:

On 4 Iyar, we commemorate Yom HaZikaron (Remembrance Day for the fallen of Israel).

On 5 Iyar, we celebrate Yom Ha’Atzma’ut (Israel’s Independence Day).

On 28 Iyar, we celebrate Yom Yerushalayim (The reunification of Jerusalem [in 1967 after the Jordanian army had cleaved the Old City from the new city in 1948, expelled all Jews from the Jewish quarter of the Old City and destroyed every vestige of Jewish life there.]).

The propagators of antisemitism will do their utmost to bring our celebrations to ruin. Let us defy them. Let us ensure that we stand tall, proud and strong as Jews, against their plots.

As GAJE noted last year concerning this very subject, “each of us, in every generation, is a trustee for the Jewish wellbeing of our young children and guardians of the wider Jewish future. We accept and honour these responsibilities because it is right and important to do so and because our forebears did so for us. Even as we hope our children and their children will do so for the descendants that will follow them.”

It is the role of our system of formal and informal Jewish education to reinforce what our children learn at home and help foster the marvellous feeling of Jewish belonging and peoplehood into rock solid permanence through time immemorial. It is GAJE’s role to do our utmost to try to help make formal Jewish education affordable for all the families that seek it for their children.

•••

The spirit of the mid-70s is well captured by a stanza of a poem/song written by Robbie Solomon of the Jewish folk-rock musical group Safam. The song they sang was called Leaving Mother Russia. It became the rallying cry for the Soviet Jewry movement and even an anthem of sorts for Jewish activism and courage. The song helped inspire the energies of the movement. The movement ultimately succeeded.

“I send my song of hope

To those I left behind

I pray that they may know

The freedom that is mine

For in my darkest hour

Alone inside my cell

I kept the vision

Of my home in Yisrael.

My friends we know what silence brings,

Another Hitler waiting in the wings.

So, stand up now and shout it to the sky,

They may bring us to our knees but we’ll never die!…..

We are leaving Mother Russia……”

***

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)

April 17, 2026

The Jewish Education Project (JEP), based in New York, is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving Jewish education in every realm of the reach and purpose of education. The organization has a long history. It began over a century ago as the Board of Jewish Education serving the Jewish community in the New York City area. Some 15 years ago it was redesigned and recrafted as The Jewish Education Project.

JEP has a multi-pronged mission that – according to its website – entails providing professional development, educational resources, and encouraging and attempting to foster “bold thought leadership” to an education-focused clientele. In its own words, the Project “inspires, strengthens, and propels the Jewish educational ecosystem to deliver innovative, timely, and continually meaningful educational experiences—today and tomorrow.”

We mention the Project because, in the immediate aftermath of the terror incident at Temple Israel in Michigan last month, JEP’s chief executive officer, David Bryfman, spoke with Daniel Held, Chief Program Officer of UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, for Held’s insights, both as educator and organizational officer, on the subject of appropriate communal and individual responses to the proliferating attempts to intimidate the Jewish community or worse.

Their conversation was instructive and at times, even inspiring. (It is available on the JEP website, entitled, Adapting the Future of Jewish Education: Responding to Violence: Raising Proud Children Today; March 17; Season 6, Episode 24)

Held tied the foiled attempt against the lives of the children at Temple Israel with the increasingly frequent incidents of vandalism and shootings at Jewish institutions in the GTA. His recurring message was a variation on the important theme of refusing to be intimidated, despite the worry, and at times even despite the fear. Held did not gainsay the difficulties for parents and professionals in calming fears and establishing proper security protocols. Nor did he deny the nature or the extent of the potential threats we face.

Time and again, he emphasized the need for individuals to hold “extra tight” to our families and to our Jewish identity. “We need to stand tall and proud as Jews,” Held said. “We each have a role to play in strengthening our community.”

Held’s call to stand tall and proud echoed a recent plea by Rabbi Marc D. Angel of New York who wrote, Rabbi Angel was appalled by the venom directed at the Jewish state, especially by other Jews. He outlined what he considered to be a code of sorts for appropriate Jewish responses to the treachery aimed at Israel.

“Each of us is an ambassador of our people; each of us represents the history, culture and traditions of the millennial Jewish experience; each of us is part of the Jewish destiny. To play our roles as proud and courageous Jews, we need to overcome inferiority complexes and reject ‘politically correct’ pressures; we need to stand tall and stand strong, with the wholeness of our being, on behalf of the God of Israel, the Torah of Israel and the People of Israel.”

As GAJE has pointed out in many of these weekly updates, the best, most enduring way for Jews to stand tall and proud as Jews, is to know what it truly means to be a Jew. We must know who we are and for what eternal and ethereal mission we have been purposed in order to stand as Jews. And to know this, requires education: 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
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)
April 10, 2026

It’s for the children.

The Torah meticulously records the miraculous overturning of Nature and then – even before our ancient forebears began what turned out to be their 40-year march to the Promised Land – it instructs soon-to-be-freed slaves to impart the details of story of their liberation to their children.

“And when, in time to come, you children ask you, saying, ‘What does this mean?’ you shall say to them: “It was with a mighty hand that the Lord brought us out from Egypt, the House of Bondage.” (Exodus 13:14)

And so, in the unfolding years, our Sages designed the Pesach Seder to try to bring what happened some 3,400 years ago in Egypt – the freeing of the Hebrew slaves from horrific slavery – to the vivid imaginations of our children. In all generations and for all times. Indeed, the word Haggadah, the Seder manual as it were, derives from the command v’higgadita, meaning to instruct or teach (our children).

The late remarkable, wise Rabbi Reuven Bulka of Ottawa succinctly described the essence and the purpose of the Seder. “The Seder is a pedagogic experience, in which the next generation is given a sense of history by the present adult generation…. We relive the past to become infused with an appreciation of our history, what made us what we are … to energize us to continue the traditions of the past into the future.”

The exodus from Egypt is the defining moment of our history. It is the foundation stone of our peoplehood. We recount the miraculous departure from ancient Egypt each day, every day, in our prayers and in many of our ritual practices. It was the beginning of the process that forged us into a people with a mission to help make the world the human being-focused, socially responsible and caring place that God intended it to be.

The children must be taught – lovingly, each according to his or her abilities – the story of that defining moment and its everlasting purpose. Because, after all, in their own turn, it will be in their hearts to hold precious, then teach, and ensure the transmission of the memory of that moment to their children. They must feel deeply and without distrust, that the 3.400-year-old story is their story too, a source of identity, generating pride, and embedding strength, that it is the invisible, binding thread connecting us all to each other through waves of unending time.

This feeling in our children for inter-generational connection, to carry and protect our story, was very much in evidence during TannenbaumCHAT’s music night two weeks ago. With flair and emotion and open-hearted embrace of being Jewish, the singers sang Make Them Hear You, from the musical Ragtime, written by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Charles Flaherty. Of course, the song was not written as a paean to Jewish peoplehood, or as a rallying cry summoning Jewish courage. But, as we – parents and grandparents – listened to and watched the singers perform, our hearts soared with gratitude and tingling sensation. We excerpt parts of the song.

“Go out and tell our story  

Let it echo far and wide
Make them hear you
Make them hear you…

How justice was our battle
And how justice was denied
Make them hear you
Make them hear you….

Go out and tell our story to your daughters and your sons
Teach every child to raise his voice
And then my brothers, then

Will justice be demanded by ten million righteous men?
Make them hear you
When they hear you, I’ll be near you. Again”

***

An electric suggestion, if not foreshadowing, of Pesach’s Seder pulsed in the air as the children sang. It was an exciting and emotionally affecting restatement of the message of the Seder against the dark backdrop of Israel’s war with Iran, and the increasing menace to Jewish life even here in the GTA.

Pesach begins this evening. It’s for the children to be sure. But it is also for us. For all the generations gathered around the table.

***

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

Chag Pesach samayach

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

April 1, 2026

Mitchell Consky, the CJN’s education reporter, wrote a highly telling article documenting a rebounding interest, since the enrollment nadir wrought by Covid, in Jewish Sunday school education.

Consky gathers UJA data that shows part-time Jewish education, though moderately attended, has nearly doubled from its COVID low. He interviews parents of young families, reports on an impending new weekday after-school educational program and community officials to paint a portrait of the re-seeding and re-greening of a field of Jewish education and involvement that had fallen onto yield-less, fallow times.

Daniel Held, chief program officer with the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto described the current Jewish educational horizon in the GTA. “More and more people in our community are participating in Jewish education that’s right for them,” he said, referring to parallel growth in supplementary education enrollment and Hebrew day school enrollment.

Increased demand for supplementary education arises amid growing concerns about antisemitism in Ontario public schools. While day school growth stems from several factors, “including strong school performance during the pandemic, post-Oct. 7 concerns about antisemitism and new scholarship support.”

Thought the article is ostensibly about parents seeking more family appropriate Jewish education for their children, the truer, underlying message is one of more and more young families seeking the mutually sustaining strength and comfort that flow from finding meaningful ways of participating in a sense of peoplehood.

One Jewish parent in Toronto of two children ages 10 and 5, told Consky that enrolling her children in Sunday school, this year, was a deliberate response to a moment that felt unsettled.

“Given the geopolitical circumstances of the world, and just wanting to feel connected to people that make us feel safe, we felt that being a little bit more immersed in a Jewish community would be beneficial to them”, she said.

Another parent of Jewish children in public schools told Consky that she wanted her children to build friendships with other Jewish kids, understand their background and feel rooted in Jewish culture.

As Daniel Held pointed out, families are increasingly seeking and finding their own, unique pathways during these troubling times, because of these troubling times, to Jewish education. And the reason is plain. One of the parents succinctly expressed it. She wanted her family “to feel connected to people that make us feel safe.”

But it was not only for the feeling of heightened safety that she enrolled her children in weekend Jewish school. It was for the wider, more permanently lasting benefit to her children from learning and then knowing, that they are part of the Jewish community.

 The Consky article is available at https://thecjn.ca/news/sunday-schools-rebound-as-families-seek-jewish-community-on-their-own-terms/

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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 (GAJE)

March 27, 2026

Last week in this space, we wrote about the increasingly bold, dangerous encroachment of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias into the educational system of Ontario.

The Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) recently decided to hire Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), a fringe, anti-Israel lobby group, whose bellicose propaganda offends truth and history, to train the union’s executive about recognizing and dealing with antisemitism.

IJV is wholly unqualified for the task. Indeed, its inventory of beliefs actually inspire malice and hatred toward Israel. Were the near and far term implications of the union’s decision to employ IJV not so dire, the exercise by the union would be worthy of a Saturday Night Live, nonsensical, tongue-in-cheek parody. But alas, the union’s decision is not a parody. Nor are we able to merely change the channel to be rid of the menace of lies posing as facts. But, sadly, this menace and that of institutionalized antisemitism are now upon us.

By its embrace of IJV, the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario showed its true intention to be part of the malign process of erasing Jewish history from the education of Ontario children.

One of the factually grotesque assertions by the IJV was that the use of the principles and definitions propagated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “perpetuates anti-Palestinian racism.”

IJV’s reference to “anti-Palestine racism” (APR) was purposeful. APR is a full-blown, radical, anti-Israel, educational framework for use as a tool in all public schools from grades K-12 to assess the extent and teach values of tolerance and human rights.

The APR framework was written by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA). It springs from their report Anti-Palestinian Racism: Naming, Framing, and Manifestations. The report defines anti-Palestinian racism in an outlandishly self-serving, open-ended manner, as “a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives. Anti-Palestinian racism takes various forms including: denying the Nakba [the founding of the State of Israel which they call the Catastrophe] and justifying violence against Palestinians; failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine; erasing the human rights and equal dignity and worth of Palestinians; excluding or pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives, Palestinians and their allies; defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander such as being inherently antisemitic, a terrorist threat/sympathizer or opposed to democratic values.” To ensure that the definition is never ending and permanently open ended, the report expressly states that this is not an exhaustive list of how “anti-Palestinian racism” might manifest.

As if it were a sheer pane of glass, the purpose of inventing the doctrine of APR is glaringly transparent: to use as a sword to excise modern Jewish history out of the history books in the public schools of Ontario.

Some school boards, including the Toronto District School Board have already adopted the APR framework. But because the Government of Ontario recently placed the TDSB and some other school boards – for financial-related reasons – under the supervision of the Ministry of Education, the use of APR has been temporarily halted by those boards. The danger of its use, however, still exists, as there are other entry points into the curriculum for wielders of APR apart from those controlled by the Board itself, such as by parent committees.

A great deal has been written about the threat posed by the doctrine of APR to the public educational system, to the Jewish community and to democratic values. See for example, Mitchell Consky’s reporting in The CJN, articles in the Alliance of Canadians Combatting Antisemitism, and especially, a superb backgrounder on the subject by the North American Values Institute (NAVI).

Dr. Mika Hackner, the author of the NAVI study, refers to APR as an “emerging threat”. She urges Jewish communities and friends to “be on the lookout for this noxious framework and be prepared to oppose it head-on. The framework not only formally adopts a radical, one-sided anti-Israel understanding of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, it treats any disagreement with the anti-Israel party line as inherently racist. And, given the penchant of radical education fads to spread from school system to school system, it is a real and present danger to Jewish communities in the diaspora.”

Dr. Hackner is right. We – proponents of civil society, democratic values, mutually respectful rules of intellectual engagement and a secure future for Jews here – must oppose APR head-on. There are at least three steps of opposition:

• Call it out for what it is: yet another attempted breach of the walls of truth, so vital to us.

• Oppose its infiltration into public school education.

• Raise Jewish children to know and cherish what it means to be part of the Jewish people.

The NAVI backgrounder is available at:

Click to access Backgrounder%20on%20Anti-Palestinian%20Racism%20in%20K-12%20Education.pdf

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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 (GAJE)

March 20, 2026

The nature and the extent of the intimidating, anti-Jewish atmosphere in Ontario’s public schools have been studied and well chronicled by experts. The most recent report on the subject was released last summer by Deborah Lyons, then Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism.

Prof. Robert Brym, the author of the report commissioned by the Special Envoy, attested the following in court about his findings.

“In my view… antisemitism is widespread in Ontario’s K-12 public and Catholic schools, especially English public schools; the data demonstrate that school authorities have failed to address the problem in any meaningful way….. [T]he antisemitism faced by [Jewish] children in public schools has worsened substantially since 2000, with the most dramatic change being the period post-October 7, 2023. Based on the data, I characterize the situation as a crisis of antisemitism in which Jewish schoolchildren are being put at significant emotional and physical risk when attending non-Jewish publicly funded schools.”

Policy-makers in the Ministry of Education may be not be aware of the situation for Jewish children in Ontario’s public schools. Or perhaps they do not much care. But the Jewish community is indeed aware of and cares greatly about the situation. And we are very concerned.

Now, however, there is even more reason to be concerned for our children in the public schools.

An announcement last month by the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) may have flown beneath the radar for many members of our community. As reported in The CJN, the union, which represents some 83,000 members, has decided to undertake training for its executive in how to recognize and deal with antisemitism. The announcement might have earned accolades. It should have been greeted with kudos and commendations but it was unworthy. For, the trainers whom the ETFO appointed were unworthy of the assignment. ETFO chose Independent Jewish Voices (IJV). It is a fringe group, representative of very few individuals within the wide and eclectic Jewish community, and without any known record or experience as educators and consultants on the subject for which it has been hired.

And there is worse.  An argument can be reasonably made that IJV actually contributes to antisemitism.Iso Setel, a spokesperson for IJV, told The CJN that the IJV “take(s) antisemitism really seriously.” Setel attributed antisemitism to “this larger growth of the far right, of white supremacy, of authoritarian politics.” He absolved the haters of Jews on the far left of any responsibility for the spread of the hatred.

Worse still. Setel said IJV’s training addresses what the group views as the misidentification of antisemitism. He elaborated. “When political criticism of Israel and the ongoing genocide and occupation (our emphasis) is misrepresented that dilutes the meaning of antisemitism.”

The constant accusation by the IJC of “ongoing genocide” by Israel is an outright lie. It is a calumny of equal malignancy as the blood libels against Jews of medieval times. The frequency of its regurgitation generates and inspires the very hatred toward Jews that we thought had so bothered the ETFO to take steps to ostensibly deal with it.

And worse even more. With seeming, proud defiance, Setel told The CJN that IJV “firmly rejects the use of International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which distorts the definition of antisemitism to conflate political criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and perpetuates anti-Palestinian racism.”

Most readers of this update know that IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism has been adopted or endorsed by some 47 countries, including Canada. Setel’s description of the IHRA definition precisely fits the lies-as-truth propagations in the morally inverted world that IJV and like-minded haters of Israel inhabit.

The reference to “anti-Palestine racism” was a clever, but transparent shot across the bow of the ship carrying The CJN’s readers. It was intended to remind us that many people in Ontario’s educational teaching establishment hope to soon use “anti-Palestine racism” (APR), as an operational principle in establishing curriculum. In truth, it is an attempt by the haters of Israel to distort and then erase Jewish-Israeli history from the books and classrooms of our province. (More on this next week.) And yet this is the group that the ETFO hired to educate the union’s executive about antisemitism. The choice of IJV casts a revealing light on the ETFO’s true purpose.

Amir Epstein, executive director of Tafsik Organization, a Jewish advocacy group focused on combating antisemitism and defending Zionism, suggests what that purpose might be. “This is a calculated strategy … designed to legitimize hate. And it must be exposed and condemned without hesitation.”

GAJE agrees. We condemn the ETFO’s decision. And we are worried – again, and still -for our children in Ontario’s public schools.

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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 (GAJE)

March 13, 2026