Summertime has just inched past the halfway point. In one month our children return to school.

Alas, we cannot yet say that for most families Jewish education for their children is more affordable today than it was last year. But nor will we say that the challenge indeed, the obligation, of making Jewish education affordable is out of reach, is beyond the collective ability of our community to make it happen. Despite the many laudable achievements of our community, until Jewish education is truly affordable, we will be less than we could be, less than we must be to fulfill the timeless aspirations and values of our people.

The community is indeed making progress toward making Jewish education affordable, though we have not yet arrived at our goal and the journey to the finish line is slower than we had hoped.

That we are still in mid-effort rather than celebrating the attainment of our objective must not discourage us. We must continue to push forward without losing resolve or determination. In his commentary on this week’s Torah portion, (Matot-Masei) Rabbi Marc Angel suggests how we can do that.

“Judaism imbues us with a sense that every day has meaning, that we can grow and attain something new and better. Life is not a rut or a routine; we are not trapped or locked in one place….

“We do not succumb to frustration or despair …. We are not here to achieve egotistical goals such as fame and power, but to serve God and humanity. Greatness is not measured by the number of lines one receives in history books, but by the myriad small deeds of kindness and charity and goodness that we have performed, by our positive impact on family, friends, and society.

“The detailed description of the Israelites’ travels in the wilderness reminds us of the importance of the past stages of our lives. It also serves to call our attention to the future, to the Promised Land, to the goals not yet attained. Just as we are strengthened by our past, we are energized by the hopes for our future.”

The goal of affordable Jewish education is not yet attained. But, as Rabbi Angel tells us, we are not locked into this place of unaffordability. Our hopes for the future energize us.

Failure is not an option.

Rabbi Angel’s commentary can be found at:

https://www.jewishideas.org/past-preludethoughts-matot-masei

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Shabbat Shalom

GAJE August 2, 2019

The problem of unaffordable Jewish education in our community will be solved when the full community mobilizes to solve it. This means that men and women and families from across the spectrum of Jewish communal life must become involved or contribute in some way to finding a solution.

An example of wide community involvement in solving a pressing community problem arose last week from a small Jewish group of parents in South Manchester in the U.K. The nature of the problem facing the parents there was quite different than the tuition dilemma parents here face.

Nevertheless, it is important that we share the example because the message it sends is relevant to us as well, i.e., refuse to believe that it is hopeless or that we are helpless at finding an appropriate solution.

The London-based Jewish Chronicle last week reported that a group of parents took upon themselves the task of finding the necessary funding to ensure the North Cheshire Jewish Primary School would be able to provide sufficient classroom space for children who wish to attend the school.

The school is the South Manchester’s only Jewish primary school and had planned to restrict entry to only one class of 30 students. This would have left at least 14 children, whose parents seek a Jewish education for them, without a place at the school. Such a prospect was utterly unacceptable to the parents of these 14 children. They refused to believe that they were helpless to intervene. Thus they launched an appeal to raise £100,000 to ensure the school would be able to provide enough places for children who want to go there.

One of the parents and the campaign’s liaison manager, said, “The funds raised by the campaign would go towards ensuring excellence across the school and providing as many places as possible to the Jewish children of South Manchester in a school that embeds a love for Jewish life and Israel for today and the future”.

We commend the decision of these South Manchester parents, They got involved because their objective is to “embed a love for Jewish life and Israel for today and the future”. That is our goal too. It should be the goal of Jewish education throughout the world.

Setting aside the details of the dilemma the parents at North Cheshire Jewish Primary School faced and of the solution they devised, we learn from them:

• not to give up searching for answers.

• not to give in to the seeming intractability of a problem.

• and to seek the solutions together, as a community.

Failure for the South Manchester parents, and for GAJE, is not an option.

The JC article can be found at:

https://www.thejc.com/education/education-news/manchester-parents-launch-100k-appeal-to-finance-extra-school-places-1.486446

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Shabbat Shalom

GAJE July 19, 2019

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has succinctly and pointedly expressed the deeply rooted, permanently engrained significance of education to the Jewish people.

In his collection of essays, From Optimism to Hope, he wrote: “Long ago the Jewish people came to the conclusion that to defend a country you need an army. But to defend a civilization you need schools. The single most important social institution is the place where we hand on our values to the next generation – where we tell our children where we’ve come from, what ideals we fought for, and what we learned on the way. Schools are where we make children our partners in the long and open-ended task of making a more gracious world.”

Making our schools affordable to all families who seek a Jewish education for their children has been – and is – the single motivating force driving all of GAJE’s efforts.

Moreover, and especially, GAJE is determined to demonstrate through the legal system that since the permanent viability of Jewish schools – and of other independent, publicly monitored, denominational schools too – is vital to the continued future of the smaller communities served by these schools, the viability of these schools is also vital to the continued future of Canada’s thriving multicultural, multi-religious, tolerant society.

Thus, a public educational system that is also committed to helping ensure the permanent viability of the smaller communities’ schools will also help enhance and strengthen the overall educational system as well as society itself.

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Shabbat Shalom GAJE July 12, 2019

Ever since the Supreme Court of Canada in 1996 declared constitutional Ontario’s unfair educational funding policies, the community has been stymied in attempting to fulfil its historic aim of trying to ensure that every family would be able to afford a Jewish education for its children.

That sense of communal frustration was compounded a decade later in 2006, when the Ontario electorate rejected the candidacy of John Tory for premier. Tory had explicitly said during the campaign that he would introduce a pilot project to try to bring some measure of fairness and justice to the province’s educational funding.

In the intervening 23 years since the Supreme Court’s decision, Ontario’s demographics have changed: large numbers of Ontarians have indicated a preference for more competition in schooling. Indeed, the funding experience of the next five largest provinces after Ontario indicates that public funding for some portion of the general studies portion of independent schools eventually saves money for the public treasury. And during that same period of time, we know, alas, the cost of living a Jewish life in the GTA has skyrocketed. Jewish education had become out of reach for a great many young families.

Last year the community leadership committed to making the affordability of Jewish education to be their first priority. Their decision was celebrated at the time, remains celebrated today, and deserves to be commended and supported.

Individuals from all walks within the community, however, are still divided about the wisdom and propriety of attempting to have the courts reassess and perhaps reopen the 1996 decision of the Supreme Court.

GAJE believes it is the correct thing to do. Some people disagree with us.

In his commentary this week on Parashat Korah, Rabbi Marc D. Angel suggests how such a difference of approach within the community should be handled.

“When people—individually, communally, nationally—have disagreements, they can engage in serious discussion and dialogue even if the parties are critical of each other’s positions. Each can offer arguments and refutations. Both sides—even if holding very different positions—can still find a common ground and can see themselves as working toward one goal.”

The diverse and disparate efforts of concerned and interested members in the community are aimed at the same target: making Jewish education affordable. And as Rav Angel suggests, we enhance our chances of reaching the target when we all stand on common ground.

Rabbi Angel’s full article is available at:

https://www.jewishideas.org/criticism-or-contempt-thoughts-parashat-korah

Shabbat Shalom

GAJE July 5, 2019

Earlier this month, a family of philanthropists in Chicago, owners of homes for the aged in the area, announced a “ground-breaking, cross generational effort totalling $11 million to support and sustain Jewish day school education across the Chicago Jewish community.”

Whenever private and communal support of Jewish education is so publicly championed, irrespective of the locale, it is important that the news reach as wide an audience as possible in the hope that other generously inclined individuals and families will be inspired to follow the example.

Structured as endowments, the funds comprise an allocation of $11 million over a five-year period to three Chicago-area schools: The Associated Talmud Torahs’ REACH program, Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago (SSDS), and Chicago Jewish Day School (CJDS). The funding is intended “to maximize each institution’s impact and ensure their long-term sustainability.”

In explaining the reason for his family’s donation, Alan Caplan, said “the Hebrew words l’dor v’dor are literally inscribed into the doors at Park Plaza (Home for the Aged). “From generation to generation; that’s what we believe in, as individuals and as part of the Jewish community, and that’s exactly what this gift is: a gift that gives from one generation to the next, and the next after that.”

Caplan succinctly captured the importance of funding Jewish education by describing education as the anvil on which the links of Jewish life connecting one generation to the next – l’dor v’dor – are eternally forged.

In expressing her school’s gratitude for the funding gift, Judy Finkelstein-Taff, Head of School of the Chicago Jewish Day School, described further the trans-generational significance and beauty of Jewish education: “It seems very poignant to me as we look at the cycle of our lives and think about how we stand on the shoulders of the ones who came before us. We educate our students to celebrate the diversity of their present, and our students become the next generation of shoulders for their children to stand on. This gift will not only ensure the future of our school, but in a sense, it is ensuring the future of the Jewish people.”

If it is true that imitation is the highest form of compliment, we hope there will be local philanthropists of equal mind, heart and caring for the future of the Jewish people to pay high compliments to the Caplan family of Chicago!

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Shabbat Shalom

GAJE

To our community: let’s finally resolve to make education affordable

“A people which two thousand years ago had already pioneered compulsory education for boys and which in its educational endeavour and community sponsorship was far superior to its neighbours, including even such enlightened nations as the Greeks and the Romans, such a people has known for ages that the community at large is responsible for education.”

The late, revered historian Salo Wittmayer Baron wrote those words in 1966 in the introduction of an essay concerning the Jewish community and Jewish education. They comprise the perfect reflective touchstone today as we say “congratulations” to all of our children, most of whom have just completed the school year 2018-2019.

In addition to feeling joyful that the year has ended, they deserve also to feel pleased and even proud that they are now further along the path to living meaningful – and positive – Jewish lives, confidently and purposefully. This is irrespective of their academic results, or whether they have completed SK, Grade 5, Grade 8 or Grade 12.

Today we must also say “thank you” to everyone involved in helping provide a Jewish education to our children – caretaking staff, administrative staff, teachers, principals and volunteer board members of the many schools. 

And today we also say thank you to the community leaders who have undertaken to make Jewish education affordable for every family that seeks it. Their commitment is poignant proof of the truth of Baron’s observation and of the heart warming comfort that his statement is as true today as it was when he wrote it as well as during the time, some 2,000 years ago, of which he wrote.

Baron noted however, it was the community at large – not leaders and philanthropists alone – who are “responsible for education.” This has been GAJE’s message since we began publishing these weekly updates nearly five years ago.

It falls upon us all – according to our respective means and abilities – to be responsible for Jewish education. For if our educational system is at risk because it is beyond the economic reach of most young families, so too is our future as a vibrant Jewish community.

Therefore, let’s finally resolve to get it done. Let’s make Jewish education affordable.

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Shabbat Shalom

GAJE

Just over a year ago Doug Ford was elected to form the government of Ontario. He became the province’s 26^th premier. The year has veritably galloped across the field of time. With one week left in the school year, it is appropriate to measure the government’s path in relation to the issues of concern to GAJE.

Alas. There appears to have been no public movement by the government to ameliorate the unfairness of the current educational funding system. The five largest provinces, outside of Ontario, extend some funding to independent schools. This is not simply a matter of self-interest on the part of families wishing to enrol their children in independent schools. The experience of B.C. has shown that by conferring some form of funding assistance to independent schools, they spend public funds more efficiently than Ontario and achieve stronger educational outcomes than Ontario. 

We must not retreat from reminding the government of the need to address these vital educational funding matters. Nor is there any harm in doing so. Indeed, there is only harm in not doing so. 

An excellent starting point is to join the education-related, communal initiative – Every Kid Counts – already underway. We wrote about this campaign last month. It is important that we do so again.

Every Kid Counts is aimed at changing the government’s policy that “denies many students with special needs access to various essential health services because they happen to attend an independent school.”

Federation and CIJA are urging the government “to expand the range of services offered by the School Health Support Services program” to include every child with special needs who face unique learning challenges. The government’s funding policy is wrong, Federation and CIJA state, ”because it denies children with disabilities access to the educational environments they may require. We believe every student, regardless of ability, should have equal access to the services they need to succeed.”

The Every Kid Counts campaign may be accessed at:

After one year, the Government of Ontario is no longer new. It is time they heard from our grassroots about the issues that matter so vitally to us and to our future.

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Shabbat Shalom

GAJE

Israeli-based author Maayan Gutbezahl posted an article on Jeducation World entitled Let My People Know: The Steinsaltz Approach to Jewish Education that explores the radically thoughtful approach to teaching established by the renown scholar, writer, educator, thinker.

In the course of the article, Gutbezahl quotes Rabbi Michel Falk, the head of the Steinsaltz Yeshiva in Tekoa, Israel and a former student of Steinsaltz. “Many young Jews don’t feel totally at home in their Jewish lives,” Rabbi Falk said. He must have been speaking tongue-in-cheek for his observation ranks as profound understatement.

But in describing the essential task of the educator, Rabbi Falk spoke plainly the core challenge. “Many young Jews feel that a Jewish life is something that belongs to their grandparent’s generation, or to the rabbis in the synagogue, but it’s not something accessible to the personal life of the common Jew. And that is the challenge we have today – how to help young students understand that they, too, can really ‘own’ their Judaism.”

How young Jews can be helped to feel that they too can “own” their Judaism in an authentic, meaningful way is an appropriate question to ponder on the eve of Shavuot.

For it is, after all, the holiday that commemorates when the disparate, rabble of former slaves received the prescription for leading a good, worthy, purposeful life: freedom, a mission and the Law. 

The teaching method that Rabbi Steinsaltz introduced and which subsequently became considered as revolutionary in the Orthodox world “seeks to pull back the veil obscuring texts and encourages students to find their way to the peshat, or simple meaning, by blazing their own trail in the pursuit of Jewish knowledge.”

In other words, the venerated scholar/teacher encourages, even demands, that his students think for themselves and not be afraid to ask questions.

“The Steinsaltz philosophy,”Gutbezahl wrote, “is rooted in the importance of questions as an educational tool, as they are uniquely personal. By asking questions, and receiving targeted answers, students start to feel like a piece of text is something that they can understand and relate to, instead of something that rabbis with many years of study managed to “figure out,” with unquestioned accuracy.”

The motto of Rabbi Steinsaltz’s educational endeavours is “Let my People Know.” He is not reluctant to hear, let alone answer difficult, if sincere, questions.

It is a motto GAJE endorses on behalf of the community’s families and children. It is imperative that young Jews know who they are. Only thus can they make informed decisions about how they wish to live their lives as Jews. But the schools, where their questions will be encouraged, must be affordable.

Gutbezahl’s article is available here:

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Samayach

GAJE

In his commentary this week on parshat Behukotai, Rabbi Marc D. Angel, inspires us that we can take to heart in our efforts to make Jewish education truly affordable. He imparts the message that it is vital for individuals to move past good intentions. To make a difference, individuals must actually take steps.

It is not always an easy thing to do. Rabbi Angel understands this. People become locked into their routines and often cannot summon the will to make the required change. But he encourages us not to yield to the inertia of good intentions.

He finds compelling wisdom in the words traditionally spoken out loud by synagogue congregations when the public reading of one of the Five Books is completed. The words vary somewhat between Sephardi and Ashkenazi congregations. But they are variations on the same theme. Indeed, they rely upon the very same core phrase. In Rabbi Angel’s synagogue the congregation proclaims (in Hebrew, of course): “Be strong, and let us strengthen ourselves; be strong and let your heart have courage, all you who hope in the Lord.”

He tells us that “hizku” can be translated as “strengthen yourselves, be resolute”. Only after we adopt that sense of resolve, “ve-ye-ametz levavhem”, then “God, in turn, will give courage to your hearts.”

The first step, Rabbi Angel suggests, is to strengthen ourselves in the face of self-doubt, or lack of confidence, or feeling stymied. Then we must decide to take action. Rabbi Angel writes it very succinctly: “We need to take the initiative; we need to demonstrate resolution; we need to assume responsibility.”

Rabbi Angel’s insistence upon the need to act, to take initiative resonated for him with a memory of a reading in “The Heart of Man” by Erich Fromm. “Most people fail in the art of living not because they are inherently bad or so without will that they cannot live a better life; they fail because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide.” (Our emphasis)

It is not hard to see how Rabbi Angel’s and Fromm’s insights apply to GAJE’s mission. Affordable Jewish education is achievable. We – the community – must make it so. We stand at a fork in the road. The path we choose will determine the Jewish future of our community. We cannot leave the responsibility to the next generation. We must act now.

Rabbi Angel’s dvar Torah is available here.

The Federation agrees with this depiction of the situation. The leadership has proclaimed making Jewish education affordable to be the community’s top priority.

One of the education-related, communal initiatives underway is a campaign, Every Kid Counts, to remedy discrimination by the Government of Ontario that “denies many students with special needs access to various essential health services because they happen to attend an independent school.”

Federation and CIJA are urging the government “to expand the range of services offered by the School Health Support Services program” to include every child with special needs who face unique learning challenges. The government’s funding policy is wrong, Federation and CIJA state, ”because it denies children with disabilities access to the educational environments they may require. We believe every student, regardless of ability, should have equal access to the services they need to succeed.”

GAJE agrees with this effort by Federation and CIJA. Community members must join the effort. In the words of Rabbi Angel and Erich Fromm, we must recognize we are at a fork in the road that requires us to decide to act. Go to the Every Kid Counts site to let the government know that the discrimination in its funding policies is offensive and objectionable.

The Every Kid Counts campaign may be accessed here.

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Shabbat Shalom

GAJE