The manifestations, after October 7, of hatred toward Israel and Jews around the world, but also on the streets of Canada, have unnerved us. But they have not immobilized us. Nor will they ever.

They have also provided an illuminating insight into one of the key administrative/management differences between public and independent schools. Joanna DeJong VanHof, a researcher at think-tank Cardus, and a PhD student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, was quite exorcised when she read that the administrators or educators of a TDSB school refused to tell the parents of students of the school that swastika graffiti had been scrawled in a washroom in the school in November.

The Toronto Star reported that the TDSB has “moved away from telling parents about these incidents” in order to reduce the likelihood of “copycat acts.”  VanHof correctly concluded that the TDSB’s policy appears to be based on the belief that to de-escalate a situation, silence is best. And parents are not needed.

“What absurdity!,” VanHof proclaimed. “As a parent, and as a student of education, this approach baffles me. Does the TDSB actually think parents don’t need to know? That they wouldn’t share the goals of the school in de-escalation? Or worse, which is clearly implied, that they wouldn’t be capable of parenting appropriately? That involving them really would increase the likelihood of “copycat acts,” not reduce it?”

VanHof uses the “silent” approach of the TDSB to the dreadful appearance of the swastika in the school washroom as a jumping off point to compare the approach to solving such problems in most independent schools where “parents are real, actual partners in education”.

Parents of children in the Jewish school system in the GTA and in other locations will likely be able to confirm this latter observation by VanHof about parental involvement in independent schools.

VanHof points out that “independent school communities are growing. They’ve grown by more than 20 per cent over the last decade in Ontario, and most schools I know have wait lists. Parents want change. TDSB enrolment, by contrast, has declined by seven per cent in the last five years alone. Much of that may be due to high costs of living for families and, recently, decisions to move out of the city. But a lot may also be parents exercising their right to a different choice for their child. Most parents just want a safe learning environment that meets their children’s needs.”

GAJE agrees with VanHof’s observations concerning what most parents want for their children’s education. We would also add, of course, that we want fairness in the educational funding of our children in the schools that best meet their needs as Jews of Canada.

As we have often pointed out, the best way to stand against those individuals who attempt to foist their anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatreds upon the rest of us trying to build a law-abiding, freedom-loving, truly democratic and Jewish way of life here is by “doing Jewish”, by boosting Jewish life, by affirming the values of our traditions that provide us focus, strength and purpose.

VanHof’s article can be found at:

Independent Schools Help Parents Who Feel Left Out by Public Boards

•••

Reminder: GAJE awaits the decision of the Divisional Court on the motion by Ontario for leave to appeal the 46-page ruling by Judge Eugenia Papageorgiou allowing GAJE’s application to proceed to a hearing in court. We will share the decision as soon as we receive it.

•••

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit for fairness in educational funding, please click here.

For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of underwriting the costs of the lawsuit.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

January 26, 2024

Am Yisrael Chai

Traditionally, when the completion of the reading of the Torah portion on Shabbat marks the end of one of the Five Books of Moses, the congregation chants “Chazak. Chazak. V’nitchazek”. Loosely translated the words mean, “Be strong. Be strong. And we will strengthen each other.” Or some people might say: “Strength. Strength. And we will become strong.”

The classic Alcalay Hebrew-English dictionary defines the term chazak as “to be strong, firm, robust, courageous.” Thus, however one translates the Hebrew, whether as prescriptive or descriptive, its essence is a call to demonstrate courage by taking communal (collective) action.

The reminder to demonstrate courage is – and has always been – at the very core of the recurring, formative instruction to the Jewish people. The communal rallying cry to show courage and to find the strength necessary to do so – however difficult – reverberates within the Jewish soul even if the Jewish mind does not always hear or remember it.

Canadian lawyer, human rights advocate, Adam Hummel, has recently written about the need for all us to show courage during this unsettling, alarming rise of hate post-October 7, directed at Jews. In an article entitled, Courage:It couldn’t come at a better time, published on January 10 in Substack,Hummel urges us to be “brave, bold, and courageous”. But true to the nature of someone who ‘does’ as well as ‘says’, Hummel suggests several ways to do so.

He provides five specific characterizations of behaviours from which individuals might take action and, in the result, also find our courage.

Hummel concludes that “however hard it is to be a Jew at this time, we must know that this is one of the best times in history to be Jewish. We have a voice, we have respect, we are cohesive, we have a country, and we have an army. 

Nothing is stopping us from being brave. Everything is telling us to be strong and of good courage (chazak ve’amatz). Let’s seize the moment and stand for what we know to be true. 

Am Yisrael Chai”

Hummel’s article is important. Substantive. Instructive. And inspiring.

It is available at: https://catchjcp.substack.com/p/courage

GAJE reminds our readers that we await the decision of the Divisional Court on the motion by Ontario for leave to appeal the 46-page ruling by Judge Eugenia Papageorgiou allowing GAJE’s application to proceed to a hearing in court.

•••

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit for fairness in educational funding, please click here.

For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of underwriting the costs of the lawsuit.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

January 19, 2024

The beating-heart core of GAJE’s mission is to try to help make Jewish education affordable for those families who seek it for their children. Our advocacy – our very purpose – focuses on affordability. On occasion, however, we have drawn readers’ attention to what GAJE regards as important aspects or developments relating to Jewish education.

This week’s update is such an occasion.

Sholom Eisenstat – an esteemed GTA educator and co-founder of ADRABA, the innovative approach to reaching and teaching Jewish content to young people who cannot or do not attend conventional Jewish school classrooms – sent GAJE an article by David Bryfman, CEO of The Jewish Education Project. Bryman’s article is worth sharing. He states that “among the new realities that we face as a people” after October 7 and its aftermath, “Jewish educators will need to formulate some of the biggest questions that they have been faced with since 1948.”

Bryman, of course, is correct in his assessment of October 7 and its aftermath as a watershed moment in modern Jewish history. We agree with him based upon our own experiences of these past three months and based upon the experiences of our forebears that we have heard from them directly or read about in the pages of history texts.

As an educator’s educator, Bryfman’s observations about the impact of October 7 upon the modern Jewish classroom, demand our attention. GAJE does not, indeed cannot, judge his conclusions, other than to say they warrant widespread assessment by experts in the field. To us, Bryfman’s suggestions commend themselves as self-evident truths. He posed five questions for immediate discussion. (We have truncated the commentary that he added to each question.)

• What is the relationship between the head (cognitive), heart (affective), and hands (behavioural) of Jewish education? Bryfman notes that “recent weeks have revealed that generations of Jews, even if proud of being Jewish, are largely illiterate regarding some of the very basics of Jewish life, history, and Israel.”

• How, when, and why do we teach antisemitism? “Pogroms, blood libels, and Jewish control of the world are 21st-century memes that have resurfaced in ugly ways that cannot be ignored or relegated to the pages of Jewish history. And yet, Jewish education cannot rely on victimhood to establish either Jewish guilt or pride.”

• How do we love both our family and humanity as a whole? Jewish educators must be able to grapple with questions of Jewish tribalism and universalism, with unequivocal dedication to both.

• What time do we dedicate to Israel education? In the limited time all of us have with learners we must make difficult choices about what to teach, based in part on what learners need most, right now. …At certain junctures Jewish educators will need to consider whether Jewish education is about preserving the past or about preparing for the realities of today and tomorrow.

• What does it mean to be a proactive Jewish educator? We must be able to respond to what 21st-century Jews need. Especially now, the answers should not and cannot look the same as when most Jewish educational organizations were first developed.

After posing the questions and pointed commentary, Bryfman urges all stakeholders in the enterprise of delivering Jewish education to begin educational reassessment immediately.

“It has become increasingly evident,” Bryfman says, “that reluctance to engage in these discussions would be a failure with massive consequences – namely the disenfranchisement of generations of Jews who right now arguably need us more than ever.” (Our emphasis)

Wherever the Jewish curriculum lands as a result of October 7, GAJE will ever be devoted to trying to help make it truly affordable.

Bryfman’s article is available at: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-775975

•••

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit for fairness in educational funding, please click here.

For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of underwriting the costs of the lawsuit.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

January 12, 2024

In three months, at Pesach, we will have completed nine years since the founding of GAJE. Our mission was then, and remains, to help make Jewish education in our community affordable for every family that wishes to send its children to a Jewish day school.

It was our view in the Spring of 2015 that “the affordability of Jewish education is the most important immediate and long-term priority for our community leaders…. By striving to make Jewish education more affordable, we fulfill a moral obligation to our community and a historic obligation to the wider Jewish people.”

That is still our view today.

October 7 and its disheartening aftermath, alas, have added laser-light clarity to that view and has unambiguously, if painfully, affirmed the pre-eminent importance of Jewish education.

The aftermath of October 7 has reminded us, especially outside of Israel, that a strong, resolute, organized and caring community is the chief instrument of our first response to threats to Jewish survival. The shared, concentric nucleic circle of our lives is the Judaism of common history, traditions, values, and purpose. It is the foundation of the remarkable architecture we call “community” that connects us one to the other and helps sustain us through travail and challenge.

History has taught us that the best – though not the only – way to build community and a sense of peoplehood among Jews is through education. There is no mystery to this formula.

Rabbi Marc D. Angel, whom we have often quoted in this weekly update, reminds us that “Children are not born into a historical vacuum. They are heirs to the generations of their family going back through the centuries and millennia….[T]he challenge to the older generations is to transmit to the new generations a feeling of connectedness with the past.”

Wherever Jews have lived throughout our long history – in the Land of Israel and in our wanderings – we have always ensured that feelings of connectedness with the past inspired the building and maintaining of a structure of community.

Taking their cue from the Bible, our Sages referred to this structure as a “holy community” (kehila kedosha). What made the community “holy”, our Sages took great pains to remind us, was how we behaved, especially one toward the other. Very few among us, if any, needs reminding after October 7, that if there were ever a time to demonstrate holiness as a community one toward the other, that time is now.

Holiness – kehila kedosha – begins with education. Education leads to the establishment of true community. Community directs actions and behaviours whose highest aim is to demonstrate care and concern one for the other. And that leads us back to kehila kedosha, which in turn, brings us to the importance of affordable Jewish education.

Ontario’s educational funding supports and prefers one religion to the exclusion of the others in our province. Indeed, to the ongoing perplexity and frustration of most knowledgeable observers, Ontario contributes nothing to enable families to enroll their children in independent schools – unlike the educational funding practices of the next five most populous provinces in the country.

As readers of this weekly update know, GAJE launched an application in court to compel Ontario to change its unfair, anachronistic policies. The government tried to have our application thrown out of court without a hearing on its merits. They then brought a motion for permission to appeal the ruling. We await the outcome of the government’s motion for leave to appeal.

•••

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit for fairness in educational funding, please click here.

For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of underwriting the costs of the lawsuit.

•••

Shabbat shalom

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

January 5, 2024

Looking back….

On August 21, Judge Eugenia Papageorgiou of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice rejected the attempt by the Government of Ontario to throw out of court GAJE’s application to compel Ontario to introduce fairness in the province’s educational funding.

In 46 pages of compelling, controlled reasoning and detailed research, Judge Papageorgiou explained why she believed GAJE’s case deserves to be heard on its merits in court. She wrote:

“There is a reasonable chance that the Grassroots Applicants will be able to satisfy the test in Bedford and Carter (the rules for revisiting Supreme Court decisions). In that regard, there is a reasonable chance that an application judge may find that the Grassroots Applicants have raised: i) new circumstances or evidence which have fundamentally shifted the parameters of the debate; and/or ii) new legal issues as a result of significant developments in the law which support the revisitation of binding precedent.

“My finding in this regard is not based upon one single argument raised by the Grassroots Applicants; it is based upon the combined effect and totality of the new circumstances (social, political and legislative) and developments in the law they have raised. “

Judge Papageorgiou did not decide the case on its merits. She was not asked to do so. She was asked to decide whether GAJE’s case should be given a hearing in the courts. She decided that it should. Her decision was enormously significant. For the first time in nearly three decades, a court agreed that parents and grandparents of children attending Jewish schools ought to have their pleas for funding fairness and justice adjudicated in court. GAJE still does not have a date for a hearing on its merits. Not surprisingly, Ontario brought a motion for permission to appeal Judge Papageorgiou’s ruling. A decision on that motion is expected early in the new year.

And so, we wait and hope that Judge Papageorgiou’s decision will not be overruled.

Then, on October 7, Jewish history changed forever.

The events of that horrific day and the stunningly shameless manifestations of hatred toward Israelis and Jews, in the day’s aftermath, on the streets, in the workplaces and academies throughout the civilized world, left us – at first – with diminished space in our emotion-choked hearts and minds for pondering the next steps of GAJE’s application.

But we – and the Jewish people – found our strength and marshaled the resolve and the resources to repair and restore what had been diminished and bruised in our hearts to carry forward GAJE’s cause even as Jews around the world found the courage and the voice to affirm and assert the blessing of Jewish peoplehood and of its permanence.

Anti-Israel protesters of all ages and backgrounds deny, ignore and even gaslight Hamas’ evil purpose – despite the ubiquitous evidence, including from the frequent pronouncements of their leaders – that is, the destruction of Israel and the slaughter Jews.

Hamas is the vanguard of a malevolent force of hardcore, resolute haters of Israel and of Jews. In this mission, Hamas is joined by Hezbelloh in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Islamic Brotherhood wherever they are situated. The ruling Shia theocracy of Iran is the paymaster, trainer, and director of this truly genocidal collective.  The one “holy” purpose this group shares is the murder and slaughter of Jews and the elimination of the only sovereign Jewish state on planet earth.

Despite the demonstrators disrupting normal life in the cities of the West, despite the equivocation of the leaders of Academia, despite the bad faith, distorted, “balanced” news coverage of the war, neither Hamas nor their hateful confederates are freedom fighters.

They are not liberators. They demonstrated the depth and the beastly depravity of their hatred for Jews and for Israel in the ghoulish manner in which they attempted to “liberate” the Gaza-area communities on October 7. The mass slaughter on October 7 by Hamas was in addition to their battlefield tactics of endangering, harming and even killing fellow Gazans and firing rockets primarily at Israel civilians from behind the cover of Palestinian civilians.

The ignorant and/or untruthful anti-Israel demonstrators shout that the Jews are occupiers or have no connection to the Land of Israel. Let us remind them that the very name Jew derives from the name for the place Judea, where our Jewish ancestors lived and who, in their revolutionary belief system that all humanity was created in the image of God, gave the world the Bible.

The Jews of Israel are actually fighting for their right to live sovereign in their own country on the very land on which our ancestors lived and speaking the very language they spoke.

Looking forward…

And thus,

In the year 2024, our community – along with all caring Jewish communities worldwide – joins the fight to defend Israel and the Jewish people, inspired and informed by Jewish education, by “being, knowing, doing and celebrating Jewish”. That is our task going forward into calendar 2024. It has been the task of every generation from Jewish antiquity to today.

•••

Am Yisrael Chai. The People of Israel lives and will always.

Shabbat shalom. Happy, healthy, peaceful 2024.

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

December 29, 2023

Last month in Ottawa, Cardus senior fellow Deani Van Pelt delivered a public lecture on trends in education in Canada in 2023 in which she also reflected on the leading edge of change in education today. An adapted version of her talk was published by Cardus under the title Charting New Horizons for Independent Education in Canada.

Van Pelt introduced her presentation with the clarion assertion that “education matters for our individual well-being, our civic health and our national and global stability.” Against the current unsettling backdrop of increasingly brazen manifestations of hatred – directed against Jewish Canadians – in our public spaces and even in our public schools, Van Pelt’s statement is more a pressing prescription than it is a lofty description for the system of education in Ontario that is essential for shaping and protecting our society.

Mobs pretending to be protesters with hurt sensibilities, threaten everyone who stand in their way. The objects of the mob’s scorn are Jews, but the victims of the mob abuse are all peace-loving, law-abiding Canadians.

Noted thinker and columnist, Bret Stephens, expressed the threat posed by the bullying, dangerous mobs quite succinctly: “Antisemitism is a problem for democracy because hatred for Jews, whatever name or cause it travels under, is never a hatred for Jews only. It’s a hatred for distinctiveness: Jews as Jews in Christian lands; Israel as a Jewish state in Muslim lands. Authoritarians seek uniformity. Jews represent difference.

“Whenever antisemitism rears its head, it isn’t just Jews who are in the cross hairs. It’s freedom, education and human dignity — values all of us should share, whether you’re Jewish or not.”

And so, if we are to fight for our society – as we must – a society, in Deani Van Pelt’s words, whose educational system aims at achieving “individual well-being, civic health and national and global stability”, it is imperative that we impress upon the government the need for a new, better system of educating Ontario in this day and age.

Van Pelt’s prescription is an excellent starting point. She calls forth evidence of best educational practices throughout western jurisdictions and concludes “that we are …entering an era of education plurality, evident through a diversity of providers, approaches, learners, and funders.

She is also careful to allay the concerns of doubters and skeptics that pluralism in education is simply a formula for heightening communal differences, leading to ethnic or balkanization within our society and the retention of inter-communal enmities and/or grudges.

“Pluralism, by definition,” Van Pelt writes, “does not prioritize or prize one version of education over another. Rather, all are expected to be excellent spaces. What is key is that a variety of secular, philosophical, and religious schools can all contribute to the common good, to flourishing students, and to healthy civic formation.”

Van Pelt insists that a pluralistic approach in educational funding must focus on the common good. Pluralism in education does not simply mean freedom for communities to teach according to their respective differences, values and needs. It also means teaching with regard to the shared responsibility for the common good of civil society.

“Educational pluralism insists on quality,” Van Pelt writes. “Education is a common good in which neighbours care about the civic outcomes of schooling for one another’s children and thus includes accountability for structures for education. This civic responsibility includes strong curricula and healthy school culture, both of which are key to student success… The core of what can hold diverse communities together in pluralism…is agreed-on broad curriculum standards, a shared understanding of which core concepts are necessary to know.

“… It is a system of education in which the government funds and regulates, but does not deliver, all education options.”

“Pluralism allows for moral difference, encourages civil society to play a role in education, and insists on equity and quality.”

GAJE supports Van Pelt’s prescription for a new approach in funding and in the delivery of education. Funding will be fair, for the benefit of all Ontario families. And the curriculum will be regulated and monitored for the benefit of the common good of a society that strives without cease, to advance individual well-being, civic health and national and global stability, where anti-Semitism is overtly and publicly shunned and as Bret Stephens would therefore say, in which democracy flourishes.

•••

The adapted text of Van Pelt’s Ottawa presentation is available at:

Charting New Horizons for Independent Education in Canada

•••

Am Yisrael Chai. The People of Israel lives and will always.

Shabbat shalom

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

December 22, 2023

The blood-lusting fury of October 7 and its aftermath have turned our world upside down.

False parades as true. Murder as resistance. Face-covering cowards as principled protesters. As the immoral accuse the moral.

Last week, the United States vetoed a resolution in the Security Council that would have compelled Israel to cease firing at Hamas. In response, the Hamas leadership branded the United States “unethical and inhumane” and unconcerned for human rights.

For the past many weeks in the downtowns of cities across the world, anti-Israel demonstrators have brandished signs and posters accusing Israel of committing genocide while shouting for the complete liberation of Palestine “from the river to the sea”.

Ideologically oriented journalists, academics and many of their students, having lost their voices and their consciences when the Syrian regime, ISIS, the Taliban, the mullahs of Iran and other unkind rulers slaughtered their own people, nevertheless point to photos of the heart-wrenching displacement of Gazans as proof of crimes against humanity.

Right and wrong have been inverted. And we must call it out and fight against it whenever and however we can.

Three men who lived (and died) in the last century can help us do so. We must learn that they were, who they were and what they taught. And we must understand that what they taught flowed from a foundational belief in the values that derive from Jewish thought and philosophy. None was “religious” but all were proudly Jewish.

Five days after the 75^th anniversary of the proclamation of the International Declaration of Human Rights and adoption by the United Nations, on December 10, 1948, is an appropriate time to recall these men.

Hersch Lauterpacht, a British Jew, was a human rights activist and extraordinary scholar and jurist of international law. It was he who devised and brought the notion of “crimes against humanity” into the canon of justiciable international law.

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, introduced the term “genocide” and was instrumental in bringing the Convention on Genocide into the canon of jusiticiable international law.

Lauterpacht and Lemkin were contemporaries. They were born in eastern Europe and were shaped by the ideals shattering last century of the last millennium. Coincidentally, both men studied for a time in Lviv. The story of the intersection of their lives was poignantly depicted in an excellent book by Phillipe Sands published in 2016 called East West Street.

René Samuel Cassin, a French Jew, was the principal – though not the only – author of the International Declaration of Human Rights. His colleagues on the project, including Canadian jurist John Humphrey, acknowledged that the declaration “was primarily the engineering feat of René Cassin.” A veteran of World War I, Cassin fought all his life in the trenches of the struggle on behalf of the intrinsic worth and dignity of all mankind. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968 for his lifelong efforts.

Lauterpacht, Lemkin and Cassin born on the same continent and outraged by the same forces of evil and brutality, strove with all their intellect and their might to prevent such evil from ever rising again. For a brief moment after World War II, the civilized world agreed there was a role for the rule of law in protecting all humanity. The Nuremberg trials incorporated the notion of Crimes Against Humanity. The Genocide Convention was the first human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948. And on the very next day, on December 10, 1948, the 58-member General Assembly of the United Nations passed the International Declaration of Human Rights. (There were eight abstentions and two no-shows.)

Alas, as recent and other events have sorrowfully proven, there should be no illusions about the true enforcement of human rights in international law. Despots, tyrants and terrorists pay no heed to rules other than the rule by power that secures total control over their own peoples.

None of these three great jurists were naïve about the world in which they lived or about the true reach of the legal standards they helped create to try to protect all individuals around the world. They believed in the ideal and in the humanitarian implications that spring from the belief that “all human beings are created in the image of God.”

Just like Lauterpacht, Lemkin and Cassin, we too should try to hold onto the ideal that our laws must affirm the dignity of all human life as the guiding value of our actions. The first words of the Declaration are: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Is this not the ideal way of life also taught by our Sages and reaffirmed throughout the generations in the texts of Jewish education?

In awarding the prize to Cassin in 1968, the Nobel Prize committee pointed out that “it was on just such a cold December day as this, exactly twenty years ago…a small light was lit and the moral commandments contained in the Declaration, like those written on the tablets of Moses, will in the years to come play a forceful role in reforming the conscience of man and his understanding of what is right and wrong.”

It is a good thing at this time of year to speak of small lights illuminating a large darkness. For after all, who, more than we, understands the deeper meaning of this imagery?

We must not be paralysed by the thuggish protesters who chant their lies against Israel and who abuse the historic legal principles given to the world by Lauterpacht, Lemkin and Cassin. We must find our courage and fight, as appropriate, for a society that is built upon the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.

•••

Am Yisrael Chai. The People of Israel lives and will always.

Shabbat shalom

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

December 15, 2023

Exactly six years ago this week, the late Rabbi Lord Sacks participated in a debate in the British House of Lords on the role of education in building a flourishing society. (GAJE reported on Rabbi Sacks’ debate remarks after he spoke them in the House of Lords.)

In a precise four-minute speech entitled “The world our children will inherit tomorrow is born in the schools we build today”, Rabbi Sacks pleaded for an educational system that instils in children knowledge and values.

“We need to give our children an internalised moral Satellite Navigation System so that they can find their way across the undiscovered country called the future. We need to give them the strongest possible sense of collective responsibility for the common good…. There is too much “I” and too little “We” in our culture and we need to teach our children to care for others, especially those not like us.”

Rabbi Sacks words echoed in the air this week like a clanging, piercing fire alarm against the unnerving and disheartening testimony at a congressional hearing in the US by the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. Neither could find it in her respective world view or conscience to state categorically that calling for the genocide of Jews amounted to harassment, bullying or intimidation. Each equivocated and dissembled, preferring to state that before the words amounted to intimidation they had to evolve into conduct. As if publicly, loudly advocating for the slaughter of Jews were not itself conduct. The context of the call for genocide was also determinative for the presidents in deciding whether Jews – as individuals or as a group – would feel harassed or intimidated when a mob of people or even a single person, urged others to kill Jews.

When the leaders of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, fail to grasp that actively calling for the genocide of Jews is more a matter of unpleasantness than of intimidation, we are entitled to ask of them: What sort of schools are they building today? And it thus becomes imperative to ask of our law-abiding, freedom-loving, democracy-imbued society, and indeed, of ourselves: what hate-laden world will our children inherit, as a result?

The questions are not speculative. In the aftermath of October 7, they take on a pressing urgency for us and for our society.

These are dark days, figuratively and literally. All of us who care to preserve and to strengthen our free and democratic way of life, have a role to play in lessening the darkness. The candles we light during Chanukah will be an unsubtle reminder that since we are all involved, we must all respond. We are all on the front lines in fighting to save our Judaism and our Jewishness from

those who resent us and who hate our religion and resulting peoplehood. As a result, we are all on the front lines in fighting to save our society.

The late Rabbi Joseph Kelman of Toronto often reminded congregants that the etymological root of the Hebrew word Chanukah was the same as that for chinuch, ie, education. The homiletical connection, he pointed out, was obvious: Education is – and has always been – the light by which every Jewish generation has kept aglow the eternal flame of Judaism. This is no mere rhetorical flourish. It is an observable truth that all of us – in some form and at some time – have witnessed and understood deeply in our hearts.

The responsibility of ensuring Jewish continuity is only partially fulfilled in holding dearly onto what we received from our forebears. Its fuller realization is in passing forward to our own children, before the end of our days on this earth, the values, traditions and beliefs our parents and grandparents attempted lovingly, as best they could, to entrust to us.

Since October 7, joining the battle to ensure Jewish continuity means also joining the battle to ensure the continuity of our free, tolerant, law-abiding society.

•••

Am Yisrael Chai. The People of Israel lives and will always.

Chag Urim Samayach. Shabbat shalom

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

December 8, 2023

Last week we reminded readers that GAJE awaits a ruling from the Divisional Court on a motion by Ontario seeking permission to appeal the 46-page decision of Judge Eugenia Papageorgiou that allowed GAJE’s case to proceed through the courts to a hearing on its merits.

In the document it filed with the Divisional Court, Ontario argues in various iterations that Judge Papageorgiou misapplied the principles of law that governed Ontario’s attempt to throw GAJE’s case out of court before it could be heard on the merits.

In response, of course, GAJE’s legal team argues that it is Ontario, NOT Judge Papageorgiou, that incorrectly applies the legal principles that determine whether GAJE should be allowed to argue its case in all of the circumstances of 2023.

The following is excerpted from the Overview of the argument presented to the court by GAJE’s lawyers in response to the Attorney General of Ontario. It explains, in broad terms, why Ontario is wrong in impugning the correctness of Judge Papageorgiou’s decision.

“2. Ontario brought a motion to strike the application, arguing that it was plain and obvious the Applicants had no reasonable prospect of success. Justice Papageorgiou dismissed Ontario’s motion. In her decision, [Justice Papageorgiou] found that it was not plain and obvious that the Applicants could not meet the test set out by the Supreme Court of Canada…..based on the overall combined impact of a number of changes in circumstances as well as developments in the law since the decision in Adler v. Ontario.. was released. Accordingly, [Justice Papageorgiou] found that there is a reasonable argument to be made that the factors raised by the Applicants fundamentally shifts how jurists would understand a number of legal issues including:

a) Whether section 93 of the Constitution and section 29 of the Charter should be interpreted so as to immunize government action from Charter scrutiny in light of international treaty obligations, the duty of state neutrality, and the section 93A amendment;

b) Whether the failure to fund other faith-based schools violates the Applicants’ freedom of religion in light of the principle of state neutrality, increased existential threats to the Jewish community, increased emphasis on diversity and minority rights, and the Vriend decision;

c) Whether the failure to fund other faith-based schools violates the Applicants’ equality rights in light of international treaties which engage the principle of non-discrimination in education, the principle of conformity as well as other advancements in international law;

d) If there is a basis to revisit (a), and the scope of Charter rights, and if a violation is found to occur, the analysis under section 1 of the Charter will be much richer now than it was in 1996 when Adler was released.

3. The decision of [Justice Papgeorgiou] involved a careful analysis of the Supreme Court precedents referred to by Ontario, including an analysis of the application of the…. tests to the facts and law presented in this case. Rather than contradicting these precedents, [Justice Papageorgiou] applied these principles. The discussion regarding the application of international law and the corresponding principles of interpretation will all be weighed and determined by the judge on the Application. Justice Papgerorgiou’s decision merely suggests that the Application is not doomed to fail on these grounds – that it is not plain and obvious that the Application will fail.”

It is important to bear in mind: Judge Papageorgiou was not asked to make a decision about the fairness of Ontario’s educational funding policies. She was asked to decide whether GAJE should be allowed the opportunity to argue in court that Ontario’s educational funding policies are unfair and thus, possibly, illegal in the year 2023. And she determined, indeed, GAJE should be allowed that opportunity.

The shocking, unfolding aftermath of hatred toward Jews and Israel on the streets of Canada since October 7, makes quite clear that the long-term, permanent stakes involved in GAJE’s application are very high.

•••

Am Yisrael Chai. The People of Israel lives and will always.

Shabbat shalom

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

December 1, 2023

As all of us know, neither war, tragedy nor travesty arrests the rise and fall of the sun. And so, we must still keep our eyes on the legal process which GAJE has launched against the Government of Ontario, even as the State of Israel defends itself against those who would destroy it and as the Jews of the world defend themselves against those who would harm, if not destroy, us also.

On August 20, Judge Eugenia Papageorgiou delivered a 46-page ruling that GAJE’s application for fairness in educational funding should proceed to a full hearing despite Ontario’s attempt to have it thrown out of court before such a hearing could take place.

Unhappy that the court had decided against it, Ontario filed a motion on September 5 to the Divisional Court seeking leave to appeal Judge Papageorgiou’s ruling. As of next week, the Attorney General for Ontario and GAJE have filed the documents that the Court will rely upon to rule upon the AG’s motion.

After Judge Papageorgiou’s decision was released, Allan Kaufman, the noted lawyer, lecturer, professor, labour arbitrator wrote a brief op-ed explaining the background to and the import of GAJE’s application to an unaware public. October 7 and its aftermath, and other considerations however, prevented a timely publication of Kaufman’s essay.

To bring GAJE’s lawsuit back into the communal spotlight, we now publish Kaufman’s article.

•••

“The Atlantic provinces of Canada refrain from providing government funding for any religious schools. I respect that point of view, and no court can force them to do otherwise. Quebec plus the four western Canadian provinces provide some funding to all of the religious schools in those five provinces. Ontario is an outlier. The Ontario government is the only province or state in all of North America that fully funds not only its public schools, but also the schools of only one religion (Catholic), but no other religion. When I tell my American friends about this anomaly, they think I must be making it up, since it is well established in law throughout North America that all governments must refrain from discriminating in favour of only one religious denomination.

How does Ontario get away with it? The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the Adler case in 1996 that Ontario’s funding of Catholic schools, but no other religious schools, is legally justified under the Constitution of Canada. A condition of Ontario and Quebec joining Canada in 1867 was that the Canadian Constitution would require Quebec to protect its Protestant minority schools, and Ontario would protect its Catholic minority schools.  In the Adler decision, many of the justices waxed eloquent about this “grand constitutional compromise,’ and how it must now be immune from any challenge under Canada’s antidiscrimination laws.

But then a funny thing happened.  Less than a year after the Supreme Court of Canada had decided Adler, the Quebec government repealed the constitutional protection that its Protestant schools had enjoyed since 1867, and the Canadian parliament approved that constitutional amendment.  That left the “grand constitutional compromise” (on which the Adler decision had been based) in tatters. That may mean Ontario’s refusal to extend funding to any religious schools other than the Catholics, can no longer be shielded from antidiscrimination and freedom of religion scrutiny.

As a result, an Ontario Jewish community group called Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (“GAJE”) has brought a recent court challenge. GAJE submitted a study to the court to show why Jewish day school education is essential for the long-term survival of the Jewish community. The Judge in the GAJE case pointed out that GAJE’s court case does “not seek any order or declaration which could adversely affect the funding of Roman Catholic schools. Rather [GAJE] seeks to obtain the same benefit the Roman Catholic schools and public schools receive…”

The Ontario government tried to knock the GAJE case out of court at its inception by asserting that GAJE had no reasonable prospect of success – since the Adler case had already decided the same issue back in 1996. That same argument had always been a winner for the previous McGuinty government of Ontario any time any religious group in Ontario had sought to challenge Ontario’s school funding. In the GAJE case, however, Justice Papageorgiou of the Ontario Supreme Court recently ruled that GAJE’s court case could proceed forward against Ontario for a final decision. Not only is the “grand constitutional compromise” that underpinned the Adler decision no longer in place, but after Adler had been decided the courts articulated a new doctrine where funding of only one religion would violate the principle of “state neutrality” on religions. The Adler decision may no longer be consistent with this new principle, wrote Justice Papageorgiou.

Furthermore, GAJE’s international law lawyer, David Matas, demonstrated in court that the funding of only Catholic schools to the exclusion of all of Ontario’s many other religious schools, is not in conformity with a number of international treaties signed by Canada that prohibit government discrimination in favour of any one religion. Justice Papageorgiou suggested in the GAJE case that Ontario may need to bring its laws into conformity with those international obligations. This point had never been considered when the Adler case was decided in 1996. This does not mean that Ontario needs to repeal its funding for Catholic schools, but instead to extend funding to all other religious schools – just as we have seen that the Provinces of Quebec and all four of the western Canadian provinces currently do.

All of the many other non-Catholic religion schools in Ontario, including the Protestant religious schools, have been relegated to second class status in Ontario for many decades. All of those other religious schools would benefit if the Jewish community is eventually successful in the GAJE court case. Since such a court decision would not threaten the funding of Catholic schools in Ontario, the Ontario government should do the right thing now by extending funding for all religious schools in the province before the courts end up dragging the province kicking and screaming into the 21^st century.”

•••

As soon as GAJE receives the decision of the Divisional Court, we will report it to you.

Am Yisrael Chai. The People of Israel lives and will always.

Shabbat shalom

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

November 24, 2023