GAJE still awaits the decision from the Supreme Court of Canada on whether the Court will allow us to continue with our case for fairness in funding education in Ontario. When it arrives, we will share the Court’s decision at the first opportunity.

The fight for funding fairness is obviously, first and foremost, to enable as many of our families as possible to send their children to Jewish day schools. More children would attend day schools if their families could afford to send them there. Even so, despite the high tuition – three years after October 7, because of October 7 – the demand for spaces in Jewish schools exceeds the supply.

Which is why the fight is about more than abating the financial hardship of the tuitions. It is also about the future of Ontario society. The events coursing through our Ontario streets and institutions since October 7 have exposed the deeply wounding cut of that inequity and added to the hurt and the pain.

How can Ontario be indifferent to the fact that the rights and freedoms enshrined in Canada’s constitution some 44 years ago, are blocked from applying to Ontarians, today in 2026, by an agreement made 159 years ago with Quebec and then, undone by Quebec some thirty years ago? In all honesty, reasonableness and conscience it cannot. It should not.

•••

It is well documented that the public’s falling confidence and failing trust in Ontario’s public schools, have contributed to the increase in demand for spaces in all of Ontario’s independent schools, not just in the Jewish day schools.

It is therefore important to keep in mind that the embrace of day school is more enduringly sustained for positive reasons rather than for negative ones.

Two years ago, in a clearly-worded article, Prizma, the network organization based in New York, that supports Jewish education in North America, provided the following concise reasons for embracing day school education.

“The impact of Jewish day schools extends beyond academic achievement; it impacts the whole student with a spiritual, ethical, and intellectual education. Extensive research shows that the foundations built during childhood have a lasting impact throughout one’s life….

“Research conducted over the past two decades unequivocally illustrates the profound and lasting impact of Jewish day school education on individuals and the broader Jewish community. More than academic instruction, Jewish day schools provide an immersive environment rich in Jewish customs, values and culture. This holistic approach fosters strong Jewish identities, deep connections to Israel, and a commitment to communal involvement that extends well into adulthood.”

And so, GAJE awaits, with undiminished hope. May we receive positive news from the SCC. Achieving fairness in Ontario’s educational funding would indeed be good for the Jews. But it would be even better for Ontario.

•••

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

October 30, 2026

It is not often that those of us who have never served in armed forces can receive direct instruction from a distinguished, former commanding officer who served long years in a highly dangerous combat zone.

It is even far less often when the commanding officer is not Jewish yet offers advice to a Jewish audience about the imperative of providing Jewish education whose aim is to help fashion “a Jew who stands up straight, proud and with dignity rather than ‘a Jew with trembling knees,’ to borrow from Menachem Begin.”

And so, GAJE calls attention to an op-ed written by Col. Richard Kemp CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) and published last month by eJewishPhilanthropy. Col. Kemp served 29 years in the British Army, including as commander of British forces in Afghanistan and head of international terrorism at the U.K. Joint Intelligence Committee

He serves presently on the board of Club Z, an organization founded more than a decade ago in California that strives to better equip high-school age Jewish teens to cope with the anti-Jewish, anti-Israel buffeting they will inevitably encounter after they move on from their secondary school education .

Col. Kemp describes a multi-experience program of extra-curricular immersion that adds skills to the classroom knowledge that the teens have already acquired.

“They begin with learning what it means to be a Jew and a Zionist, because without that knowledge and the confidence it brings, too many are lost the first time they meet even passive hostility. Then come the facts, techniques and arguments that equip them for everyday conversation, formal debate and responding to online abuse. They learn how to build Jewish and Israel groups at school. They also learn leadership skills that will help them steady fellow students who have had none of this preparation….

“[E]ducation cannot do the job alone. What makes it hold is everything built around it: overnight retreats, practical experience in the community, mentorship, friendships and support that continues long after graduation. Each part reinforces the others.”

Col. Kemp pleads with community elders and funders to make available the immersive part of education as well as the classroom component.

“Napoleon said that in battle, the moral is to the physical as three is to one. The same is true here. A key aim of the Jew haters is to demoralize Jewish students: to drive them out, force them to hide their identity or even turn them against the Jewish state and their own people. Knowledge answers the arguments. Identity — and a community ready with backup when things get dark — is what keeps a young person from giving up.”

The op-ed is interesting and worthy because of its content as well as its author. It is available at:

A curriculum alone won’t get Jewish teens through their time on campus. Immersion will.

•••

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

October 23, 2026

The celebration immediately even on October 7”, of Hamas’ barbarity, the lionization of Hamas’ bloodlust and manifest hatred towards Jews and Israel was a shock to Jews around the world. It is well documented that the vile behaviours on the streets of North America (and not only North America) after “October 7” awoke many Jews into seeking the fellowship of other Jews and to discovering (or rediscovering) the strength that flows from that fellowship and especially in learning how to feel its sustaining embrace.

Two articles appeared last week on eJP that further attested to this important development: more and more Jewish families making the determination to “fight back” as Jews, against the intimidators and the bullies. The experiences and the context described are from the United States. But the conclusions are important and worthy of sharing with GAJE readers.

Sidney Altfield, CEO of Teach Coalition, an organization that advocates for government funding for non-public schools in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida and Maryland, published an essay entitled “After Oct. 7, Jewish parents chose Jewish schools. Now we have to keep the door open”.

“Oct. 7 did not only awaken alarm,” Altfield wrote. “It awakened a determination to hold tighter to the people, traditions and identity that suddenly felt more fragile than ever. We saw families put on Stars of David they had not worn in years and walk into synagogues they had rarely attended. And we saw parents choose Jewish education….If their children were going to encounter hatred because they were Jewish, parents wanted them to understand what being Jewish meant.”

His research found that 8,502 more students enrolled in New York’s Jewish schools this year, than in 2022-23. In Pennsylvania, Altfield found that Jewish school enrollment grew nearly five times faster in a single year than its prior average.

“In a moment when hatred sought to make Jewish life smaller,” Altfield poignantly wrote, “families chose more of it.”

His main purpose is to offer suggestions, particular to the states in which Teach Coalition operates, on how to manage the high cost of Jewish education to ensure that newly enrolled children remain enrolled in the schools. The article can be found at:

After Oct. 7, Jewish parents chose Jewish schools. Now we have to keep the door open.

The second article, written by Nira Dayanim of the eJP, reports that the number of Jews engaged in Jewish life has increased in engagement is up by 7% from the previous year, according to the research of the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA).

“The survey, conducted in May and June and polling 2,836 people, found that 38% of Jewish Americans now fall into “the Surge,” a seven-point increase from the 31% recorded last spring. The figure is still lower than the 42% who reported engaging more in the first survey in 2024, but reverses last year’s decline.

“What we really thought was going to happen this year is that ‘the Surge’ would continue to decline,” Mimi Kravetz, JFNA’s chief impact and growth officer, told eJewishPhilanthropy.

Instead, we see something very different, which is that there was either a resurgence or a flattening of the surge, and that we’re now in a new normal.”

This article can be read at:

‘The Surge’ in post-Oct. 7 Jewish engagement is growing again, JFNA finds

•••

The point of drawing attention to these articles is to show that the wearying and even withering circumstances, in some places, of these dark times, are causing many Jews to “return” to their “truer”, more authentic, individual selves in order to share the feeling of peoplehood and to be part of the collective, which they know will always enfold them in the shelter of our history and the promise of our future.

•••

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

October 16, 2026

This has been a “heavy” week.

Wednesday (October 7) was a particularly heavy day.

The past three years have been heavy, almost beyond imagining.

The norms of social civility, the shared beliefs in democracy’s pre-eminence, and the paramountcy of morality as the measure of human endeavour, have been and are being ploughed under the fractured foundation stones of our way of life, by the haters of Israel, Jews the West, and their witting and unwitting accomplices.

The British journalist, Melanie Phillips, described these past three years, in her typical, hard-hitting way. “It wasn’t merely that on October 7, 2023 terrible atrocities were perpetrated upon more than 1450 innocent souls in the State of Israel. On that day, a very great evil was unleashed throughout the west, an evil that three years later threatens to consume it altogether.”

She elaborated. “Instead of rising to the support of the Israeli Jews targeted for such genocidal attack, the West turned against them. The atrocities were denied, even though the Hamas terrorists had filmed themselves on their Go-Pro cameras as they went about their infernal business…

“Professing grotesquely to be standing for conscience and compassion, western liberals and their governments declared that Israel – engaged in a desperate war of self-defence against the genocidal war being perpetrated by Hamas and its sponsor Iran – was itself a genocide and that the Israelis were guilty of war crimes.

“Every single part of that libellous and preposterous inversion has been shown to be untrue.”

As a grassroots volunteer organization whose aim is to secure – in perpetuity – the future thriving of the Jewish people through access to affordable education, GAJE understands that there can be no true Jewish future, nor indeed a true Western future, if truth is banished from the sustaining infrastructure of our lives.

For this reason, GAJE shares a statement made by Elisha Wiesel on September 30, 2026, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., about the need to defend truth, at an event honoring what would have been his father, Elie’s, 98th birthday. Specifically, Wiesel urged the museum to publicly decry the falsity of the charge of genocide hurled against Israel.

“Because it is a federal institution,” Wiesel said, “the museum faces constraints that a private citizen like me doesn’t…. But, on one question, the museum has a unique responsibility that it has not yet met. 

“Since Oct. 7, 2023, the word “genocide” has been used as a weapon against Israel — on campuses, at the United Nations and by a sitting member of the museum’s own governing council, Sen. Bernie Sanders. The charge is false. Genocide, as defined by the 1948 convention that followed the Holocaust, requires intent to destroy a people as such. Israel has fought a war it did not start against an enemy that sees its own civilians as expendable and openly declares its intent to repeat the atrocities of Oct. 7. The suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is real, and it should trouble everyone; but suffering in war, even terrible suffering, is not genocide. What Israel has done is not genocide but the prevention of genocide. 

“This is not a matter of semantics. The genocide charge turns the Jewish state into the new Nazis, and the Jewish People back into a threat to be removed from the family of nations. It inverts the Holocaust. Those who started the accusation knew exactly what they were doing. They knew that the uninformed would spread hate like wildfire. 

“The museum’s leaders have spoken as individuals….The institution itself, however, has not spoken. It made its own findings for Darfur, the Yazidis and the Rohingya. It has the scholars, the credibility and the mandate to do the same here: to explain, … why the genocide label does not fit Gaza, and what the misuse of Holocaust language does to Jews around the world… [I]t can surely address a false accusation of genocide against the Jewish state. Declining to join the accusation is not the same as dismantling it, and only the museum can do that.”

Wiesel had no qualms about his task. He determined to conscript the flagship institution in the U.S. with unassailable credibility on the subject, to debunk the lie of genocide hurled each day against the Jewish State.

Wiesel concluded: “My father believed profoundly in the power of words. They could, he said, at times attain the quality of deeds.”

Of course, we applaud Wiesel’s effort to defend truth. His father’s belief in the power of words stems fully from within Judaic teachings. The late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned against the rise and embrace of “alternative facts” within public and private discourse. He characterized it as a threat to humanity. “When people stop believing in objective truth, mutual trust erodes, making it impossible for a free society to function.”

GAJE views defending the truth as part of our mission to try to help bring affordable Jewish education to all parents that seeks it for their children. That defence falls upon us all. Where truth is trampled, the trampling of human life soon follows.

•••

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

October 9, 2026

It has been more than three months that the Supreme Court of Canada has had on its desk GAJE’s application pleading that the court set aside the Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision dismissing our case.

We hope the extent of this waiting period augers well for our hoped-for outcome. Hope and the force it can stir within the heart are not to be underestimated.

Nor are the resolute belief in the justice of our cause and the cause of its justice.

Matthew Lau, ad adjunct scholar at the Fraser Institute, published an op-ed essay this week in the National Post that shines high voltage lighting on merely one aspect of that justice. He was commenting on a report delivered at a staff meeting of the York Regional District School Board (YRDSB) that posited the jaw-dropping assertion (the truth of which the author refused to discuss) that “[T]he institution of education is an instrumental tool for maintaining and furthering the ideology of white supremacy.”

Lau points to recent data to show that there is simply no evidence to support the white supremacy theory when one examines the educational outcomes of the diverse student populations from various school boards, including the YRDSB.

However, Lau uses the proposition – whether true or not – to make more deeply compelling observations about the state of the educational system in Ontario.

“For the sake of argument, suppose that statement is true and educational institutions in Ontario really are tools for “furthering the ideology of white supremacy.” How best could we dismantle these racist institutions? The answer is easy: school choice. In B.C, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Quebec – but not Ontario – the provincial governments partially fund independent schools, making them more affordable to more families. Ontario should follow suit.

“Allowing greater choice would help remedy the unfairness of Ontario’s current system, which effectively traps many families in government-run schools because those wishing to leave must pay for their children’s education twice – once through taxes, and again for independent school tuition…”.

On the other hand, what if the statement is untrue, and Ontario’s educational system is not a tool for furthering white supremacy? In that case, parents still urgently need more school choice, so families can escape a system that engages in radical politics and wrongly tells children that the education system is racist against minorities to the benefit of the white population.”

Lau does not enter into a discussion on the merits of the suspect ‘white supremacy’ thesis. Rather, he makes the more cutting observation about Ontario’s educational system that arises from the very appearance, let alone, touting of the thesis at the YRDSB. The system is outdated and serves very poorly the families of the province. 

Lau’s conclusion is as powerful as it is plainly obvious. “The reality is that Ontario families that want to choose schools outside their local government-run school have zero support from the provincial government. Some students genuinely experience discrimination or bullying. Others might be fed up with the activist rhetoric seeping into the classroom. Others may simply want a different academic approach. Whatever their reasons, Ontario families – like families in other provinces – should have more access to alternatives to the government-run school system.”

•••

Lau pleads for offering Ontario families more choice in the education of their children. This would work to the educational benefit of all Ontario families and to the overall educational system. Of course, it also makes the system fairer for all Ontario’s children.

GAJE pleads that by preferring – today, in 2026 – to entirely fund the education of the children of one religion exclusively, the government of Ontario offends the provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Of course, providing educational funding, on an equal basis to the children of the Jewish community and to other denominational or non-denominational minority communities, would also make the system fairer for all Ontario’s children.

And so, GAJE believes resolutely in the justice of our cause (fairness) and in the cause of its justice (equal treatment according to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms).

•••

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 Samayach

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education

October 2, 2026

GAJE exists to try to help make Jewish education affordable or more affordable to young Jewish families. That has been our purpose for more than a decade, since the inception of the group.

As readers of this weekly update know, this space is usually dedicated to developments in GAJE’s lawsuit for educational funding fairness against the Government of Ontario or developments in the world of Jewish education.

Sometimes, when circumstances warrant, we depart from writing about the above two subjects, although in truth, all the subjects discussed in this weekly update are inter-related.

This week, circumstances warrant.

In particular, we refer to the pre-Yom Kippur statement delivered by the leader of the federal NDP, Avi Lewis. In the days since its release, great deal has been written, across various media, about Lewis’ preachy, smug and supercilious statement. We shall not repeat the conclusions articulately expressed by many commentators about the gap between what Lewis said and in his denial of what his language actually meant.

Of course, an extra dark element of relevance and breath-stopping gasp attached to Lewis’ words in light of the foiled attack, Sunday night, against the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville and the arrest earlier by the Durham Regional Police, of a 19-year-old for allegedly making online threats to carry out a mass shooting at a synagogue in the Durham Region. But Lewis’ words may be weighed without regard to the two violence-intending events.

Speaking ostensibly – but not really – to the Jewish people, Lewis said: “This year I’m reflecting on the fact that we failed to do our part to stop an ongoing genocide committed in our name”. 

His target audience for these targeted 23 words were his hard-core political partisans and the world of the haters who believe every malign statement about Jews and Israel. Lewis perpetuated the abject lie about a genocide. And he occasioned more delight in the abstruse, cloudy minds of Jew-haters by confirming for them that it is the Jews who are committing genocide. His audience must believe him because he did not say these words as a political leader – who most people believe or disbelieve – but rather as a Jew, that is, a man qualified, as well as entitled, to offer an authoritative opinion on the deplorable behaviour of fellow Jews.

Lewis’ statement was false, hypocritical, transparently politically expedient, morally disgusting and dangerous.

Many others noticed and said so as well.

The real purpose we mention Lewis’ statement, however, is to introduce the work of The Jewish Majority, an organization in the United Sates, that provides resources, information and training to help advocates from the vast mainstream of the Jewish grassroots educate the public about Jewish priorities.

The Jewish Majority was founded precisely for situations involving behaviours or statements such as the Lewis statement, namely, by a Jew, as a Jew, to an unknowing, broader, general public.

Jonathan Schulman, the organization’s executive director, explained how and why. “Jewish anti-Zionists have learned that organization and repetition can make a fringe position look mainstream. The Jewish community must learn the corresponding lesson: Numbers alone do not guarantee representation.

“We no longer have the luxury of silence or of hoping that someone else will speak for us.

A small number of Jews are elevated precisely because their views are useful to political movements whose larger objectives most Jews oppose. Their Jewish identity becomes a shield against scrutiny and a substitute for evidence of broader Jewish support.

“We help members of the Jewish community to articulate mainstream Jewish positions and represent their communities effectively in the press. Jewish leaders who want to use their grassroots voices in support of the community should contact us to learn more.”

The organization’s website is at: https://jewishmajority.org

•••

We cannot persuade – nor should we even try – all of the haters to stop hating. Rather, our efforts must be aimed at preventing the haters and the intimidators from taking over our streets and our institutions. We must refuse to be intimidated. We must enable fair-minded people of good will to hear the truth. And we must call on our authorities to enforce the laws against the wilful intimidators and their confederates.

•••

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 Succot Samayach

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education

September 25, 2026

It is a unique, self-directed, personal assessment and then, re-calibration if or as required, that the Torah established for us at the start of the seventh month of the Jewish calendar year.

The first day of the month: Rosh Hashana. The tenth day: Yom Kippur. The fifteenth: Succot. Revelry for sybarites are not part of the program. Rather, prayers, liturgical poetry, traditional ritual and family-centred culinary enjoyments and permanent recurring remembrances are.

Individual and collective memory are the river on which Jewish peoplehood flows – forever.

What is taught in school is reinforced in the home. What is lived at home has been learned in school. That is, and will always be – the self-perpetuating, integrated gear of the wheel of Jewish life.

The smooth functioning of that gear is very much on display with the Tishrei trilogy of holidays – usually at or near the very start of the school year.

David Zalik, the co-founder of the Zalik Foundation, has written an op-ed on the essential role of Jewish day school education in helping launch our children onto a life-long path of self-confidence, goodness and purpose.

The essay is impressive and important. It was published this week by eJP (https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/jewish-day-schools-are-a-bubble-and-that-is-the-point/?utm_source=cio)

We reproduce only a few short excerpts.

•••

“…Let’s turn to the only outstanding question that matters: What is actually best for your child, not only their college prospects? 

“Children flourish when they’re known by caring adults, surrounded by stable friendships, rooted in a community and given a clear sense of who they are and where they belong — the very conditions Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, argues modern childhood has been quietly stripping away. It’s increasingly where developmental psychology has landed. 

“Jewish day schools didn’t set out to become well-designed environments for raising children in the 21st century. They simply held onto what children need most while much of the culture let it go. These schools work because they provide three things that have become scarce in modern childhood: children who are known, children who belong and children who grow up with a clear sense of who they are. 

“A day school lifts that burden (of being the “other” in public school.). The holidays are everyone’s holidays, the calendar is theirs, the rhythm of the place is their own. Your child isn’t the different one here — they’re home. They get to spend their formative years not performing or defending an identity, but just living, with all the attention that frees up for friendship, curiosity, and joy. For a lot of children, that’s the difference between enduring school and loving it.

“There’s a deeper form of belonging here, too, that most children today grow up without: the felt sense of being part of something older and larger than themselves — a people, a story, a chain that runs back hundreds of generations. It’s one of the quieter losses of modern childhood, hard to name until you meet a child who has it. A day school hands a child that inheritance early, as a birthright, rather than leaving it as something they might go looking for later, if they ever do.

“Most (secular) schools teach children what to think about and how to score well. Few teach them how to be a person. Day schools build ethics into the day itself, not as a poster on the wall but as something students spend years discussing and practicing. They come out having absorbed a simple, unfashionable idea: that a life is measured not only by what you achieve, but by what you owe other people.

“A child who knows what they believe and has somewhere they unmistakably belong, moves through the world differently. That’s the kind of confidence that doesn’t crack under pressure.

“The child who first knows exactly who they are is the one who can later walk into a room full of difference and engage it without fear and without dissolving into it. Security isn’t the opposite of openness. It’s the precondition for it.”

•••

Helping our children learn and understand who they are, as knowledgeable, caring Jews on this earth, is the Jewish schools first task. And the Jewish home’s eternal embrace.

•••

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

Gmar chatimah tovah

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education

September 18, 2026

This evening, after the third star appears in the sky, as the sun retreats further west, we can look to a new horizon: the Jewish calendar year 5787. Rosh Hashana will have arrived.

We hope and pray the year will indeed bring the sweetness that for centuries has been the thoughtful yearning of our traditional holiday greetings. Sweetness aside, it falls to us – as it has always in every generation – to help fashion our tomorrows and to steer our lives toward the future we yearn. As the late renowned rabbi, scholar, historian, teacher Prof. Michael Brown often said: “We will write our future. It is not yet written.”

But we need Heaven’s help.

And so, during the Holyday that starts tonight and ushers in the Ten Days of Awe, our prayers glide toward the ultimate issues of our existence: a healthy, rewarding life for our families, alongside the imperative of a life well and purposefully lived according to the values of the eternal people whose history and traditions we share.

Much of the holiday’s liturgical poetry speaks of the mysteries and wonders of Creation. But the words that truly focus our minds and stir our hearts are words of tender pleading and unbroken hope. Such as….

“Remember us for life. (Let us live another year. Please)

“Inscribe us in the Book of Life. For Your sake, God, life. (Let us live another year Please.)

“Our Father, our King, have pity on us, our children and our infants. ((Let us live another year. Please.)

“Our Father, our King, act for Your sake, if not for ours. ((Let us live another year Please.)

These and the many other entreaties with which we are all familiar, are deeply personal supplications. They are whispered privately. They are chanted aloud. But both the whispered and the louder voice of our prayers are uttered in plural form. Our individual lives matter. Our lives, all life, is irreplaceable. But our individual lives are tied to our community of lives.

It has always been thus. And thus, it will always be.

The late remarkable Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks described the essence of Rosh Hashana as thinking about, securing and building the future.

There are no prophets who can see tomorrow.

Nor are there any pundits, op-ed writers, hate-laden protestors, or knowledge-less experts who can hector their falsehoods and disrespect of truth onto a wilful, confident, strong Jewish community and our democracy-loving allies.

May we be able to say at this time next year that, indeed, we did our utmost tin 5787 to make it the best year yet, to secure and build our respective futures, to determine our own destinies for the betterment of our families, our people and the wider world.

Shana tovah umetukah.

•••

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

Shana Tovah uMetukah

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education

September 11, 2026

This update is the last of calendar year 5786. The next one arrives on the eve of Rosh Hashana 5787.

The numbers are real, yet also, almost abstract, like very high floating clouds. We understand the science, but we cannot truly “reach” or “touch” them from within the earth-bound pressures and pleasures of our daily lives.

One way, however, that the numbers are within “reach”, is to understand them as the opposite of an abstraction, namely, as an affirmation of palpably verifiable Jewish peoplehood. Thousands of years: forebears, Moses our teacher, kings and judges, prophets, destruction, expulsion, dispersion world-wide and then…Return.

Upon reflection – which is one of Rosh Hashana’s perfect pre-occupations – the duration, nature, persistence, underlying values and singularity of Jewish peoplehood are a remarkable attestation of something undeniably transcendent and vital for the world.

As GAJE awaits the decision of the Supreme Court that will let us know whether we can proceed with our case for fairness in educational funding in Ontario, this moment in our annual Jewish calendar cycle deserves a re-appreciation of the peoplehood that has brought fulfillment and purpose to Jews from the very beginning, as well as blessing to the world. Indeed, it is the goose-bumpy sense of belonging to the Jewish people that motivates and has motivated GAJE’s efforts for more than a decade.

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog succinctly expressed the notion of Jewish peoplehood at a ceremony at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem in which he received an honorary degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York.

“The State of Israel and Diaspora Jewry are both facing their own challenges, but the Jewish people have a shared destiny and a shared responsibility….

“May we all continue to build together that same wondrous chain of the Jewish people: a chain connecting tradition to scholarship, Judaism to the wider world, Israel to the Diaspora, and past to future….”.

President Herzog spoke eloquently. He referenced “shared destiny and a shared responsibility”, and the “wondrous chain of the Jewish people…connecting…past and future.”                                                                  

In speaking thus, President Herzog summoned the language and the themes held sacrosanct by countless sages and “ordinary” Jews throughout the ages. He deliberately echoed the parameters of Jewish peoplehood taught by Moses himself in his farewell address to the People of Israel – formerly a rabble of slaves, but at that moment, a free nation governed by law and principle – as they were about to enter into the Land of Israel. With a stunning economy of words, Moses framed the essential aspect of Jewish peoplehood. (Deuteronomy, Chap. 29)

“You stand this day, all of you, before the Lord your God: your tribal heads, your elders, and your officials—the entire body of Israel, your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from chopper of wood to drawers of water – to enter into the covenant of the Lord your God…”.

“And not with you alone, do I make this covenant … But with those who are standing here with us this day before the Lord our God and also with those who are not with us here this day.”

Moses swept into his arms and into the eternal embrace of Jewish life and Jewish responsibility, the entirety of the people. All of us. Those present at that epochal moment. And those not present, namely, those who had died during the formative, 40-year march to the Land of Israel, and those of us not yet born. All of us. For all time.

That is why GAJE has striven these past years to achieve funding fairness for Jewish education – for the sake of those among us, those we brought us to this day, and for those yet to be born.

This is our reflection of Jewish education, peoplehood, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and Moses, our teacher as we approach Rosh Hashana 5787.

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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

September 4, 2026

Not surprisingly, the imminent end of summer vacation and the return to school, have elicited pundits’ pleas to the government of Ontario to re-consider and revise the delivery of education in our province.

Earlier this week, for example, Matthew Lau wrote in the Financial Post: “With a new school year approaching, it’s time to remind everyone that Ontario’s public school system is a gigantic mess.”

Lau was straightforward, his commentary salted with obvious frustration. At times, one could also sense a measure of melancholy. For, as he made clear to the reader, it does not have to be this way.

Lau states that the quality of Ontario’s public education system “seems bound to deteriorate further”. The best remedy to arrest and repair the system, he maintains, is to give families more choice in the education of their children.

“Giving families alternatives to the government-run school system provides access to better education, while increased competition forces improved quality by breaking the government/union monopoly. School choice can also deliver fiscal benefits to taxpayers as government funding for students in unionized government-run schools is higher than for students outside it.”

Giving parents more freedom to choose the educational approach for their children, Lau maintains, results in better overall educational outcomes and better fiscal management for the government. He cites two American studies to prove the case as well as a recent study by Cardus, a non-partisan, faith-oriented think tank based in Hamilton. According to its website, Cardus is dedicated “to clarifying and strengthening, through research and dialogue, the ways in which society’s institutions can work together for the common good.” GAJE has relied on its research in the past and cited the think tank’s work in this space.

Lau wrote: “(A) recent Cardus study on independent schools in Ontario highlighted yet more benefits of school choice. Unlike British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Quebec, Ontario doesn’t allow a portion of families’ taxes to follow their children to a private school. Despite this, there is a clear demand for alternatives to the government-run system. The Cardus study found that more than 300 independent schools have been founded in the province in the past four years.

“Beyond improving academic outcomes, school choice gives families options other than the monolithic conformity of the government-run system.”

He concludes without nuance. “The evidence continues to show that more choice would benefit parents, students and taxpayers.”

Lau – and the studies upon which he relies, urge more parental choice in Ontario’s educational system because it is the substantively correct thing to do: educationally and fiscally. Ontario’s public education system is anachronistic, no longer adoptive of best educational practices, and dramatically out of step with most of Canada and the OECD states. Indeed, over the years, in this very space, GAJE has often called attention to that same research.

Equally as important, if not actually more, over the years, GAJE has pleaded with the province to allow more choice to parents in our educational system on the basis of undoing and repairing a longstanding injustice. To no avail. The province has refused to allow us to argue our case on its merits. The Court of Appeal has agreed with the province.

Anxiously, we await the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, whether we will be allowed to argue the legal/moral/fairness/justice/equality basis for granting parents more choice in the education of their children in Ontario, as is the case in the next five largest provinces in the country.

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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

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education

August 28, 2026