In the ongoing, continuing-to-be-appalling aftermath of October 7, Israeli media carried a small news item last week concerning the country’s women’s national basketball team playing an International Basketball Federation (FIBA) 2025 EuroBasket qualifiers’ game. No Canadian media outlets appeared to report the story. It was a small story with a very large message.

For security reasons due to the war, the Israeli team played the game in Latvia as the home team. Israeli’s opponent was the women’s team from Ireland. At first, the Irish team refused to play the Israelis, preferring instead, to withdraw from the qualifying game. To its credit, FIBA warned the Irish squad that it would face severe monetary and other penalties if they did not proceed with the match. So, the team changed its stance. The game was played as scheduled.

But the Irish took umbrage at a statement by one of the Israeli players, Dor Sa’ar, that the Irish team was antisemitic. The Irish basketball authorities filed an official complaint with the organizers of FIBA Europe. “Basketball Ireland is extremely disappointed by these accusations, which are both inflammatory and wholly inaccurate,” the complaint said.

Cheryl Levi, an Israeli writer, shared her views of the Irish complaint and their feigned offence. “So, the game was on. The Irish team refused to exchange gifts and shake hands with the Israeli team (a decision that was fully supported by Basketball Ireland). They also sat on the bench instead of standing center-court during the playing of Israel’s national anthem. It was a show of supreme unsportsmanlike behavior. In fact, let’s just call it what it was: antisemitism.”

The Israeli team defeated the Irish team 87-57.

Levi further noted what most of us know also to be true. “The refusal of the Irish women’s basketball team to play against Israel is indicative of an even bigger problem. It’s a sign of the antisemitic rot that has been eating away at countries like Ireland for decades.”

She asked the important question: “So how do we stand up to countries – [we can add individuals, groups and organizations] – that have become synonymous with antisemitism?”

Levi’s question is, essentially, the very same one most of us have been asking ourselves these past four months.

One answer came from Dor Sa’ar, the Israeli player who commented on the Irish team’s prior disposition towards their Israeli counterpart. The day before the match she explained her motivation and that of her teammates. “Since October 7th, our lives have all changed, so since then it’s important to represent our country with dignity, fight on the field, and show that we are good and capable, and I believe that we can do it.”

Sa’ar’s example is one of plain courage. We should follow it. We should heed her words and take them to heart.

Of course, we do not “represent” the State of Israel – except in the eyes of the antisemites who draw no distinction between Israelis and Jews. But we can and we must “represent” and act in defense of our people, our faith and our history.

And how do we “fight”? We “fight” by being demonstrably Jewish. In the process, we “show that we are good and capable.” We are proud, grateful members of our Canadian Jewish community.

And just as Sa’ar promised, we “can do it” too. And we shall.

To ensure that our children and grandchildren will be able to join the battle, in their turn, we must try to help make affordable the education they will need to immerse themselves in the exceptional depth, beauty and sustaining strength of their faith and their history.

Kol hakavod to the Women’s National Basketball team of Israel.

Levi’s article can be found at:

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/bringing-the-battlefield-to-the-basketball-court/?_gl=1*1rawxty*_ga*OTgzMzg3MTA2LjE3MDc5NTAzMTQ.*_ga_RJR2XWQR34*MTcwNzk2NTAxMC4yLjEuMTcwNzk2Nzc0MS4wLjAuMA..

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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.

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Shabbat shalom

Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

February 16, 2024

Four months after Hamas’ ghoulish celebration of its barbaric slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis and other nationals, Israel is still at war.

Israelis and Jews around the world have witnessed the battlefield expand from the rock, sand, alleyways and dense urban clusters of Gaza to include the streets and commercial centres of large and small cities around the world, college campuses and professional associations throughout the West, non-governmental international fora, and even the wood-panelled chambers of international courts of so-called justice.

Israel and Israelis were assaulted in the vilest manner possible on October 7. Since then, Jews – wherever we live – have felt under assault as well. And it has been shocking as well as enraging.

Many observers have written about the phenomenon of Israel losing the public support it has enjoyed for most of its 75 years since its birth as a fellow democratic country. Indeed, already one month after the October 7 Hamas onslaught, veteran CBC reporter Evan Dayer wrote a story under the headline: A generation gap in attitudes could be undermining support for Israel in the West.

Dyer noted that “Canadians under age 30 tend to hold views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that are dramatically different from those of Canadians aged 55 or over.” What he meant of course, is that many, if not most, young Canadians harbour downright hostile opinions of Israel. We have seen for ourselves, in every sphere of modern Canadian life, the stunning evidence of Dyer’s observation. We are shocked – and then angered – by the extent and the nature of the support we are witnessing here for Hamas.

It is shocking because support for Hamas’ cause means support for the elimination of Israel and of Jews wherever we reside. Hamas’ worldview and chief purpose hold no place for a sovereign Jewish State. Indeed, they hold no place for Jews. Period. How, we ask ourselves, can supporters of Hamas not know this? And if they do know this and yet still support Hamas, who and what are they some of them our neighbours; many of them our children’s and grandchildren’s classmates in the universities and schools they attend.

It is precisely for this reason that shock yields to anger and anger to concerted, pointed action.

Yaakov Katz,a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and the immediate past editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post commented on this very aspect of the world’s reaction to Israel’s war with Hamas.

In an article for the Jerusalem Post, he wrote that the war has shown “that no matter where a Jew lives, their identity and feeling of safety is connected to the State of Israel.” To be sure, the war is being fought by Israel to secure its right to live, sovereign, in the land of its ancestors. But Katz also makes the point that as Israel fights, it also holds tight to the steel hard tie of peoplehood that binds all Jews around the world to it, the only Jewish country on earth.

“All Israelis have been moved to see how Jews from around the world have stood up to assist Israel during this difficult time….They [Jews around the world] have done so despite the explosion of antisemitism and the risk that it now poses to the future of American, British, and European Jewry. While Jews in Israel are obviously most at risk of physical harm, the killing of Paul Kessler at a pro-Israel rally in Los Angeles, and the death chants against Jews in Dagestan, as well as on the streets of London, indicate how antisemitism shows, to some extent, how all Jews are in a similar situation.”

“What we have to keep in mind is the objective of the protesters against Israel and the threat it poses to Jews. They want people to be afraid to speak up, to appear in public in support of Israel and to proudly identify as Jews. They want Jews to be afraid.”

Of course, in some situations, it makes sense to be afraid. But what sort of life is lived in or by fear? No. We must react and respond to champion Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state and our own individual and collective right to live meaningfully as Jews and as a Jewish community, without fear, here in Canada. 

To be such champions we must feel deeply Jewish in our souls and in our bones. That means we – our children and our grandchildren – must have access to affordable Jewish education. They must know that they are Jews. And they must know what it means to be Jews.

Katz’ article is available at:

Israel-Hamas war isn’t just about security, it’s about Jewish peoplehood

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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.

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Shabbat shalom, Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

February 9, 2024

Last week the Divisional Court allowed the Attorney General’s motion for leave to appeal the 46-page decision of Justice Eugenia Papageorgiou that prevented GAJE’s application for fair educational funding from being thrown out of court. 

The Divisional Court attached no reasons to its decision. The endorsement on the record reads: “The motion for leave to appeal the order of Papageorgiou J. dated August 21, 2023 (2023 ONSC 3722) is allowed. Pursuant to the agreement between the parties, no costs are ordered.”

Of course, GAJE is disappointed. Moreover, without an explanation of the court’s reasoning, we are also puzzled.

Justice Papageorgiou’s 46-page decision is a landmark. Granting leave to appeal it does not mean that the Divisional Court judges considered it to be wrong, only that it raised significant, issues for further argument. We do not believe the ruling by the Divisional Court should be read as a rejection of Justice Papageorgiou’s decision. Her decision dealt with important constitutional issues that the Court obviously felt required further consideration.

It is important to remember that the decision being appealed is the one that allows GAJE’s application to proceed through the courts. Justice Papageorgiou’s decision made no ruling on the merits of our application for fairness in educational funding.

Our disappointment, however, does not deter us. Nor will it ever. GAJE is guided by our belief in the importance and in the correctness of our cause. It is we – all of us – who must try to bring about the future we wish for our children and for all generations thereafter. We will not be passive to events unfolding around us. 

We paraphrase Rabbi Tarfon’s wise counsel so very long ago: “The time is short. There is so much work ahead of us. We may not be able to finish it. But we are not permitted to stop trying.” And as Hillel would have likely added: “If not now” – especially during these difficult times for the Jewish people worldwide – “then, when?” 

We now await a hearing date for the province’s appeal. We will not stop.

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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.

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Shabbat shalom

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

February 2, 2024

Am Yisrael Chai

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Charting New Horizons for Independent Education in Canada

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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.

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

Shabbat shalom

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

December 15, 2023