Since early in the month, GAJE has called attention to the emotional and other forms of preparation by our children and by the men and women who comprise the widely diverse Jewish educational system for the return to school.

We did not specifically mention, but should have, the unique preparations and strength of character required of our children returning to university or entering the halls for the first time. For their educational environment, more than most, has become toxic for Jewish students since October 7.

It is therefore, to focus upon the challenges that our university students face during the everydayness of their respective learning experiences, that we call attention to an op-ed written by Bev Shimansky, chief campus and culture officer for Hillel Ontario and Jay Solomon, chief advancement officer for Hillel Ontario. Entitled, Unapologetically Jewish and stronger than ever, the article appeared on the eJP website at the end of August. As the title suggests, the authors describe a positive, non-defensive attitude that will permeate people, programs and perspectives this year.

Compared to last year, the first full academic year after October 7, when many newly arriving students wondered “what it would mean to be visibly Jewish on campus,” the authors write of “a renewed sense of determination” for returning students on campus who “will live proudly, joyfully and unapologetically as Jews.”

To their great, everlasting credit, Hillel and its students are rallying behind an assertive and unbowed projection of Jewish identity and life. As the authors state, they “refuse to let this [aggressive, bold anti-semitism] be the defining story of Jewish campus life.” 

The authors then list five priorities on campus, “each a response to this moment and each a commitment to our collective future”.

We reproduce the priorities.

(To read their full descriptions and applications, we urge readers to go to the following link: https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/unapologetically-jewish-and-stronger-than-ever/?utm_source=cio)

1. We will unapologetically celebrate Jewish joy with more people, in more places, than ever before. 

2. We will confront antisemitism with courage and strength. 

3. We will innovate and elevate Jewish and Israel experiences. 

4. We will build lifelong Jewish journeys. 

5. We will cultivate a culture of connection, growth and leadership. 

The authors conclude by saying that they will live by the following mantra in the school year ahead: “More semitism – the enthusiastic and joyful celebration of Jewish identity – is the best response to antisemitism.”

We earnestly, whole-heartedly support our university students as they seek and, hopefully, experience the “enthusiastic and joyful celebration of Jewish identity”.

The heartening, forward approach described by Shimansky and Solomon in the fight against campus antisemitism, meshes, like two perfectly-fitting gears, with the call, in last week’s update to fight back against the haters and vilifiers of Israel, Jews and of Judaism. The enthusiastic, joyful celebration of Jewish identity is also a key “weapon” – if indeed, not the key weapon, in our fight.

We conclude by reminding readers that the enthusiastic, joyful celebration of Jewish identity requires us, first, to know who and what we are as Jews. To know that, requires Jewish education.

Jewish education is the first step.

•••

GAJE’s legal team will appear before the Court of Appeal at 10:00 on November 21, 2025 to argue that the Divisional Court was wrong, in September 2024, to reverse Judge Papageorgiou’s decision of August 2023 that had allowed our case to proceed.

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

•••

Shabbat shalom

Gmar Chatimah Tovah

Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

September 26, 2025

This time next week, the Jewish new year 5786, will be 4 days old. Our prayers and aspirations for the new year will still be fresh and hopeful at this time next week. But, they will be expressed in words fashioned by the collective Jewish heart thousands of years ago and repeated since then, each year at this time. And relevant, since then, each year at this time. As well as urgent.

The dark, menacing shadow of Jew hatred that “October 7” cast when Hamas murderers blocked out the sun, seems to be settling wider and deeper across freedom-loving countries. We have every right to be worried. But we have no right to abandon age-old, entrenched responsibilities to our children, our parents, and our people to march forward and to “fight back”.

The “weapons” in this fight are our mutually sustaining communal support, our values and our belief in the truth.

Indeed, in some ways, the struggle against the haters who vilify the Jewish state and its supporters, is a struggle to save the truth. They seek the end of truth. We seek its preservation. They seek the re-writing of history. We seek its affirmation.

The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his typically elegant, concise manner, reminded us of one of Judaism’s key beliefs on the third page of his essay on Rosh Hashana in Ceremony and Celebration: Introduction to the Holidays, (Magid Press, OUPress, 2017).

“No people has believed as lucidly and long as have Jews that life has a purpose; that this world is an arena of justice and human dignity; that we are, each of us, free and responsible, capable of shaping our lives in accordance with our highest ideals. We are here for a reason.”

That reason has many iterations. One such iteration appears near the end of this week’s Parsha, Nitzavim (Deut.30:19): “I have put before you, life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life.”

Of course, what the injunction really means is: choose Jewish life. We must choose to live proudly as Jews despite our worries and because of our historic responsibilities to our people and to the world.

To live as a Jew requires us to know who we are as Jews. To know that, requires Jewish education. Jewish education is the first step to preserving and affirming truth. Not only for our sakes, but for the sake of democracy and the rule of law.

As an antidote to the occasional in-creeping of feelings of despair that often accompany excessive worry, we reproduce a statement that appeared in the weekly update of September 27, 2029.

“In Creating the Jewish Future, a publication of the proceedings of a conference by the same name held at York University in 1996, the late Prof. Michael Brown who was then the director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, wrote: North American Jewry cannot allow blind forces to determine its destiny. It must create its own future out of the legacy of the past and the realities of the present. McGill University professor, Morton Weinfeld added: the future is not determined; it need not be accepted passively; it can be shaped and created….”

May we be able to say at this time next year that we did indeed act during these days of turmoil and blatant antisemitism, to shape our own future, to determine our own destiny, to call out the antisemites, to preserve truth and to protect our democratic way of life. And that we succeeded.

•••

GAJE’s legal team will appear before the Court of Appeal at 10:00 on November 21, 2025 to argue that the Divisional Court was wrong, in September 2024, to reverse Judge Papageorgiou’s decision of August 2023 that had allowed our case to proceed.

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

•••

Shabbat shalom

Shana tovah tikateivu v’techateimu

Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

September 19, 2025

At a major conference, this past summer in New York, on the future of American Jewry, several of the Jewish leaders in attendance were reported to have said that “making Jewish education more accessible is the key to many of the challenges facing American Jews today.”

The conference was held against a backdrop of increasingly open displays of antisemitism there – indeed throughout the Western World – generally not seen for many decades by most of the country’s Jewry.

Elan Carr, CEO of the Israeli-American Council and former U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism in the first Trump administration, told attendees of the conference: “A greater threat even than the antisemites is our own well-being internally, our own loss of identity, our own distance from our history, values and knowledge from our texts.”

There was general agreement at the New York gathering over the need to make Jewish education more widely available to young families. Not surprisingly, there were disagreements regarding best approaches to make education accessible. But at least the debate there has been joined and somewhat narrowed to the means, not to the ends.

Related to the very subject our co-religionists in the USA heatedly discussed this past July, was a “shout-out” this week in The Times of Israel, by Dr. Alex Pomson, a pre-eminent teachers’ teacher, expert on Jewish education Diaspora, to lay and professional communal leaders of our own community.

Pomson’s team at Rosov Consulting, conducted a study initiated by UnitEd, on behalf of the Israeli government’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, on the impact of rising antisemitism on Jewish day schools worldwide, with a special focus on trends since October 7, 2023.

He wrote: “Jews everywhere are experiencing profound social and cultural changes in how their fellow non-Jewish citizens relate to them. Jewish communities in North America, Europe, Australasia, and, to a lesser extent, Latin America, are seeing generationally high incidences of antisemitism; they are feeling much less secure than 10 or 20 years ago. In the course of our study, we reviewed such phenomena, and it is clear that few countries have avoided these trends.

These patterns are widely known by now; they don’t need repeating here. What is much less well known — and the prompt for our work — is what these changes have meant for Jewish day schools and especially for Jewish day school enrollment. How have schools fared in this changing climate? Our analysis of enrollment data and our interviews with school heads revealed widely varying responses….”

The Jewish day schools in Toronto, Pomson’s team concluded “have responded nimbly and decisively to the changing socio-political climate.” GAJE has consistently written – since October 7 and even well before then – about the measures adopted by the schools and by lay and professional leaders in our community to help bring Jewish education within the reach of more and more families. That Jewish education is the irremovable anchor that provides the best chances for a confident, secure, Jewishly-literate future has long been understood by decision-makers and “elders” of our community. Even, if not especially during these difficult times of “profound social and cultural changes”.

Lay and professionals involved in Jewish education in our community, deserve high praise and constant kudos for their efforts. GAJE will never stint in acknowledging the good that they do and have done for our community. But, as everyone knows, however, more must be done.

Many are involved in this ongoing effort, including of course, GAJE.

Pomson’s op-edarticle can be read at:

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/are-you-a-polar-bear-a-pika-or-a-cuttlefish-a-lesson-for-jewish-day-schools/?_gl=1*nitjkp*_ga*NzgxMzc3MDA3LjE3NDk0NTM1Mjk.*_ga_RJR2XWQR34*czE3NTczMjc0MTMkbzIxMyRnMSR0MTc1NzMyNzQ1OCRqNjAkbDAkaDA&utm_source=cio

•••

GAJE’s legal team will appear before the Court of Appeal at 10:00 on November 21, 2025 to argue that the Divisional Court was wrong, in September 2024, to reverse Judge Papageorgiou’s decision of August 2023 that had allowed our case to proceed.

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

•••

Shabbat shalom. Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

September 12, 2025

Jewish education is not easily available – if at all – for the children of families who do not reside in larger cities. This is in addition, of course, to the children of families who do reside in larger cities but for whom tuition is simply out of reach, despite the many interventions and efforts by schools and community philanthropists aimed indeed at helping families enroll their children in Jewish schools.

It was this situation that gave rise, six years ago, to the founding of ADRABA, an Ontario Ministry of Education-accredited, online Jewish High School. (adraba.ca) ADRABA is an independent, inclusive, pluralistic, academic institution that, today, has students in Ottawa, Thunder Bay, London, Hamilton, Sudbury and the GTA.

ADRABA offers the following secondary school courses, online and in real-time, enhanced with Jewish content: Canadian Jewish History, World Religions and Belief Traditions, Chosen Food, Media and the Middle East, and Jewish Philosophy

GAJE has written about ADRABA each year since its inception. We do so again this year because Jewish education for our children is paramount, not only during these difficult times, but always. And what better time is there than the very beginning of the school year to inform readers of new developments this fall at ADRABA?

According to Sholom Eisenstat, co-founder of ADRABA:

• Temple Israel, in Ottawa, is launching weekly ADRABA classes for post-confirmation teens — the first time ADRABA has been promoted to an entire congregation.

• Bnei Akiva Schools will make ADRABA courses available to their students.

• Our new RootOne partnership gives ADRABA teens access to $3,000 US scholarships toward Israel trips. (See RootOne.org)

• Students from Paul Penna Downtown Jewish Day School are enrolling in ADRABA’s Grade 9 Canadian History course.

Eisenstat pointedly reminds us that all Jewish teens today face misinformation, antisemitism, and disconnection.

For those teens who, for whatever reason, have little or no access to Jewish learning, ADRABA is an important learning option. It offers in Eisenstat’s words, “learning that challenges our young teens’ minds, strengthens their identity, and builds community connection.”

There is no worthier goal for our children from wherever they receive their Jewish education.

•••

GAJE’s legal team will appear before the Court of Appeal at 10:00 on November 21, 2025 to argue that the Divisional Court was wrong in September 2024, to reverse Judge Papageorgiou’s decision August 2023, that had allowed our case to proceed.

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

•••

We hope all children enjoyed a very good beginning to school this week.

Shabbat shalom. Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

September 5, 2025

The return of the new school year is merely days away.

As anyone who has ever gone to school knows, one can never be totally ready to switch from summer days to school days. It takes a bit of time. But at the end of the day – that is, the last day of summer vacation – there is no avoiding it.

So, in preparation for the plunge into the deep end of the school year, GAJE wishes to share with readers an article that focuses squarely on Jewish day school. More specifically, it focuses on a new initiative, using new methods, in the Boston area aimed at bringing more families into the day school system.

Shira Goodman, the former CEO of Staples, and currently the vice chair of the Jim Joseph Foundation, wrote Breaking the enrollment paradox: a new approach to Jewish day schools. Published last month by eJPhilanthropy, the article describes Goodman’s involvement on the steering committee of the Lauder Impact Initiative (LII) operating at Schechter Boston for what she describes as a “bold experiment aimed at transforming the narrative and trajectory of Jewish day school enrollment.”

Goodman explains her involvement in the initiative because, along with Jewish camps, trips to Israel, youth groups and other related experiences, day school “has proven to deliver strong outcomes.” In a world where our children need to be able to live confidently and knowledgably as Jews, communities must try increasingly to steer young families to the institutions that foster strong Jewish self-perception and identity. And as a result, day schools must be strengthened and enhanced, where necessary, to enable them to receive as many children as their families enrol.

In the parlance of the past decade of the industrial, cyber-tech, and digital embrace of new ideas, the Schechter Boston steering committee of the LII is looking to inspire innovative ways in which schools can welcome and retain larger numbers of families and their children.

Goodman writes that the group’s work has led to two transformative strategies.

“The first focuses on relationships. LII-sponsored research has shown that to inspire prospective families, we need to shape their sense of identity and help them see themselves as day school families. We believe an effective way to do this is by building connections with current Schechter families, staff and other prospective families….

“Our second strategy doubles down on early childhood education. What better way to inspire young families and build community…?

Goodman’s enthusiasm about the initiative is manifest throughout the article and exuberantly shared. Especially gratifying for a reader in the GTA, where day school diversity and enrollment are perhaps more deeply rooted in the community, is the author’s overtly stated driving mission extolling day school education and recruiting more families to become day school families.

Her concluding words are a worthy resonance for our own purposes in the GTA and wherever Jews reside throughout the world in sufficiently large numbers.

“At its core, this initiative transcends enrollment numbers at day schools. It’s about reimagining possibilities when strong organizations, visionary funders and passionate leaders with diverse experience and expertise align around a shared vision. It’s about making courageous bets on the future of Jewish life and daring to do things differently.” 

The Goodman article is available at:

Breaking the enrollment paradox: A new approach to Jewish day schools

•••

GAJE’s legal team will appear before the Court of Appeal at 10:00 on November 21, 2025 to argue that the Divisional Court was wrong to reverse Judge Papageorgiou’s decision and to then dismiss our application.

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

•••

We hope all children returning to their schools next week, enjoy a very good first day back.

Shabbat shalom. Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

August 29, 2025

Discussion and debate about the suitability of Ontario’s educational policies for our day and age, continues unabated by scholars in the field.

Joanna Dejong VanHof, Program Director, Education, at Cardus, a non-partisan, independent think tank, has written an important essay that urges citizens and decision-makers to think about the delivery of education in a subtly different way that she calls educational pluralism.

VanHof’s paper dovetails in all respects with the discussion about the fairness of Ontario’s educational funding policies. Educational pluralism refers to a system in which the government funds and regulates the delivery of education but does not necessarily deliver the education. Pluralism contrasts with the current system in Ontario in which the government has a monopoly over the delivery of education. It also contrasts with the system, which, in Ontario at least, is only theoretical, where parents have the freedom to choose the type of education most suited for their children.

VanHof’s superb essay provides insight and breadth to the vital public policy debate about the correctness in 2025 of Ontario’s entire approach to educating its children. She brings a broader, comparative, philosophical overview to the discussion surrounding the role of government in the education of its citizens as well as a prescriptive outlook regarding the mechanics of a pluralist system. VanHof contends – correctly in our estimation – that understanding educational pluralism, widening the lens, so to speak, enhances the public policy debate about the best method to deliver the best education possible.

She describes the system of educational pluralism as standing on three pillars: availability, access, and accountability. Availabilitymeans that schooling options should reflect the full range of diverse needs and values of children and communities. Access means that broad access to options should be facilitated by government funding and by reducing or eliminating geographic and technical barriers. Accountability means that schools should operate according to established norms that unify schools in their local areas and build societal trust more broadly. Government has a role to play in ensuring that broad goals are met relating to educational outcomes, student safety, and the like.

We record a few, brief excerpts from VanHof’s essay.

“The availability of schooling options…is a fundamental pillar of educational pluralism, rooted in the principle that a morally neutral education is both impossible and undesirable…..The extent to which a given jurisdiction embraces the pillar of availability may be measured by the presence of constitutional and legislative protections that permit independent education to exist and operate…”.

“Non-discrimination in the distribution of educational opportunities, broadly speaking, means that all members of society have access to their preferred form of schooling and that strenuous effort is made to remove unequal standards of schooling—in terms of both evaluation and quality. It is not intended to discourage the formation of independent schools and systems according to various pedagogical or religious values.”

VanHof concludes: “Educational pluralism seeks to accommodate a broad spectrum of beliefs about how best to provide this core institution of democratic society that is the education of children. It marries availability of very different options with broad access to them, and requires a commitment to negotiated, public accountability within distinct institutional spheres, working together in the common pursuit of quality education for each student and family.”

Her well-researched, heavily footnoted essay arrives at a propitious moment. It should help inform the vital debate about the adequacy, let alone the justice and the fairness, of Ontario’s current educational policies. It is available at: https://www.cardus.ca/research/education/reports/the-three-pillars-of-educational-pluralism/

•••

Special Educational Programme

On Thursday, September 4 at 7 PM, the New York-based Tikvah Foundation will be hosting an evening programme in Toronto with Drs. Ruth Wisse & Jonathan Silver to discuss The Crisis in Jewish Education: Rising to the Challenge. (Location to be announced.) Click here to register

For more information about the program, please see:

Join Tikvah in Toronto – September 4, 2025

•••

GAJE’s legal team will appear before the Court of Appeal at 10:00 on November 21, 2025 to argue that the Divisional Court was wrong to reverse Judge Papageorgiou’s decision and to then dismiss our application.

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

•••

Shabbat shalom. Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

August 22, 2025

The unfairness of Ontario’s educational funding policies has long been noted by educational and social planning scholars. So too has the head-scratching, self-defeating aspect of those policies. Many experts observe that educational outcomes are better in provinces that increase educational offerings for families by providing some funding to independent schools.

Last month, the subjects were raised once again in The Hub, in an op-ed written by Ginny Roth and Brian Dijkema, entitled, Why Ontario should allow independent schools and unlock true choice in education.

Roth is a Partner at Crestview Strategy and former Director of Communications on Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative leadership campaign. Dijkema is the President, Canada at Cardus.

The authors point out that even if they are not wealthy or if their school of choice does not offer financial support, parents in B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec have wide educational options for their children that may align better with their personal preferences and/or family needs. But if parents live in Ontario, they have no such choice. Though the province fully funds the education of children of one religion, it provides no funding at all to parents wishing or needing to send their children to independent schools.

Roth and Dijkema note that many parents are now saying “no” to the province’s refusal to reform educational funding. For the sake of their children, they feel they have no choice. Despite the often-staggering tuition costs for families, and without even a penny from Queen’s Park to independent schools, as of two years ago, nearly seven percent of all Ontario school-age children attend independent schools.

There are 1,445 independent schools in the province. The vast majority of them serve special needs, or special purposes, or are religiously based. Only four percent of the schools are what are commonly thought to be elite, private schools. The status quo in Ontario, tied to a problem-riddled public school system, is not working for increasing numbers of families.

In response, the authors do not offer merely theoretical solutions. They actually point to educational funding approaches of other provinces as possible models for Ontario.

Rather significantly, Roth and Dijkema also urge the remediation of a glaring injustice within the injustice of unfair educational funding. “Double discrimination”, so to speak.

“Students with disabilities and other learning needs who attend independent schools are eligible for funding from the Ministry of Health, but are ineligible for supports from the Ministry of Education. In practice, this means that a child with a hearing impairment, for example, who attends an independent school will not receive the supports that the same child would receive in a public school. Limiting this support to the public system clearly discriminates against these students and fails to recognize the complex reasons why parents choose to send them to independent schools. Students with special needs should be supported regardless of the school they attend. This injustice should be corrected to help the most vulnerable students in Ontario achieve their full potential.”

This additional unfairness against children with disabilities cannot be justified. It is without conscience in the Ontario of 2025.

We leave the last word on the subject of Ontario’s outdated, unfair educational funding to Roth and Dijkema.  “It’s time for Ontario to support all forms of education that parents choose. This would make Ontario as competitive as its provincial peers. It would also put Ontario in a position to compete with global leaders like the Netherlands, Singapore, and Finland. If Ontario truly wants to be the best place in Canada to live, work, and raise a family, a great “retention bonus” it could offer to families is funding for independent education. This shift in education policy would help ensure that every child in Ontario receives the best education for their needs, setting them up for a meaningful and productive life in the province they call home.”

GAJE agrees.

The Roth/Dijkema article is available at: https://thehub.ca/2025/07/15/ginny-roth-and-brian-dijkema-why-ontario-should-allow-independent-schools-and-unlock-true-choice-in-education/

•••

GAJE’s legal team will appear before the Court of Appeal at 10:00 on November 21, 2025 to argue that the Divisional Court was wrong to reverse Judge Papageorgiou’s decision and to then dismiss our application. As we noted last week, “it is shameful that GAJE must plead for the right to a hearing on the merits of our application for fair educational funding in the year 2025, some 30 years after the Supreme Court’s decision in 1996 that enabled the province’s approach to educational funding.

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

•••

Shabbat shalom. Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

August 15, 2025

Last week’s update noted that the recent UJA Federation of Greater Toronto biweekly social action newsletter pronounced that education is the key to fighting antisemitism.

The statement, however, specifically related to a federal report commissioned for Ambassador Deborah Lyons that confirmed antisemitism has encroached into Ontario’s public education system. Education for some Jewish students in Ontario public schools now entails being victimized by peers and in some cases, by teachers too. The newsletter urges readers to become involved in pressuring authorities to rid the school system of antisemitism. Only in a hatred-free, public-school environment can education flourish for all students. We await the province’s action plan to save that environment from the noxious poison that history knows as Jew hatred.

Countless times and in countless ways, of course, GAJE too, has noted that education is the key to fighting antisemitism. But when GAJE writes about education as the means to fight antisemitism, it refers to Jewish education. Jews protect themselves as well as broader, civil, democratic society by fighting antisemitism and the inventory of other hatreds that accompany antisemitism. Jews fight antisemitism by learning about their Judaism and their Jewish history.

Dan Held, Chief Program Officer of the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, was recently interviewed by Dr. Elana Stein Hain, Rosh Beit Midrash, senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, for a discussion about Jewish pride and self-perception. The conversation with Held was the third in a series of conversations with other scholars and educators on the subject of helping North American Jews deal with the seemingly ubiquitous post-“October 7” anxiety and dissonance.

At a time – mostly new for Jews in North America born after World War 2 – when malign and/or ignorant individuals shame and bully Jews simply because of our religion and our support for the State of Israel, the conversations are important.

Stein asked Held: “How can [we] inculcate a positive Jewish identity in a time where so much negativity is being pushed at people? How we can talk to kids about what it means to feel safe and proud as a Jew…?”

Held provided no detailed prescriptions. Each community has its unique characteristics and circumstances with which to contend. He understands that. Thus, he spoke of broader aspirations and hopes for his children and, by inference, for all children behind the desks in Jewish schools.

We reproduce just a few of his offerings.

“I want my kids to feel pride in the totality of the Jewish experience, including the State of Israel, including the struggles that the State of Israel struggles with as it wages this war.”

“This year there were 56,000 people who walked with incredible pride down Bathurst Street, down the core of the Jewish community in Toronto, celebrating our identity, celebrating Israel in incredibly strong, powerful, and vibrant ways….But people [want] to be together with other people and really connect to each other. …And we need to provide those opportunities for people to gather about Israel, but also about the rest of Jewish life…”

“[W]hat we need to do, is hold our pride, that we can engage with others and continue to feel the sense of pride and admiration for our people and for who we are, even when we struggle with pieces of our community and with pieces of who we are.”

“We need to be proud as a people of the way that we represent ourselves in society. We need to make sure that our [tile] in the culture mosaic isn’t, you know, grimy and covered and hidden and sitting behind the cement, but is actually out there in public. That’s important both for us as Jews, and I believe it’s important for the society which we want to build. And that takes pride, and that takes thought, and that takes infrastructure, and that also takes the right security structures around it. But that is really important.”

“I don’t want us to be Marranos who light candles in our basement on Friday night and have to hide our Judaism in front of others. It is critical that we be proud and it is critical that we stand tall and it’s critical that we teach our kids the value and the incredible wisdom… that Judaism has to offer that we should be offering into the world.”

Held’s reflections warrant thoughtful consideration. The last statement reproduced above can serve as the starting point. “It is critical that we stand tall, that we teach our kids the value and the incredible wisdom… that Judaism has to offer.” In other words, Jewish education.

The conversation between Stein and Held is available at: https://www.hartman.org.il/guilt-by-identification-jewish-pride-in-a-hostile-environment-with-daniel-held/

•••

GAJE’s legal team will appear before the Court of Appeal at 10:00 on November 21, 2025 to argue that the Divisional Court was wrong to reverse Judge Papageorgiou’s decision and to then dismiss our application. As we noted last week, “it is shameful that GAJE must plead for the right to a hearing on the merits of our application for fair educational funding in the year 2025, some 30 years after the Supreme Court’s decision in 1996 that enabled the province’s approach to educational funding.

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

•••

Shabbat shalom. Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

August 8, 2025

Every two weeks, UJA Federation of Greater Toronto emails Activist Update’ newsletter, The Catalyst. The newsletter highlights three current policy issues pressing upon local concern, inviting community members to get involved, to take action seeking official accountability in relation to any or all of the issues.

This week, the newsletter arrived in the email inbox with the subject title: “Education is the key to fighting antisemitism”. The first of the three items in the newsletter related to that subject. It dealt with the recently released federal report commissioned for Ambassador Deborah Lyons confirming that “antisemitism is a systemic problem in Ontario’s public education system. Jewish students are being harassed, excluded, and dehumanized—by their peers and, in some cases, by their teachers.”

The newsletter urged readers to take action with respect to the issue to help convince Queen’s Park of its urgency. It prescribes different ways readers may do so.

For our purposes, it is important to note that it is no longer controversial or doubtful in any respect, indeed, if it ever was, that lay and professional community officials agree that Jews cannot rid the antisemite of his or her antisemitism. That important, though difficult task falls to the antisemite. Jews, however, can and must protect themselves and society itself from the haters of Jews.

The newsletter refers to education in the broad sense as it applies throughout our society. It calls upon the stewards of our public educational system to ensure, without cavil or excuse, the public school system is a safe learning space for Jewish children too. The hater of Jews must be prevented from propounding their hatred, and wherever it exists, the hatred must be entirely expunged.

Though the task is straightforward, it is not easy. Even so, individuals and institutions entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining the province’s educational system must not shirk their responsibility. We already have mounting evidence in cities where Jewish parents consider public schools no longer safe for their children. (See last week’s update. The Hamilton Jewish community is planning to open a Jewish high school in 2026.)

In a recent interview with the Canadian Jewish News, Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, Deborah Lyons, explained, in part, why she stepped down from her position three months early. She was very open.

“[D]uring this period, these last two years, I’ve been really quite amazed and often become quite despondent and despairing about the fact that it was hard to get people to speak up, to speak with clarity, to speak with conviction about what we were seeing happening here on Canadian soil. Yes, there are all kinds of issues with what’s happening in the Middle East, and we should be directing ourselves to those issues as well. But if we can’t deal with what’s happening in a growing hatred on our own soil, what does that say about us? Not just as leaders, by the way, but as everyday citizens. It was a constant discussion with people about, ‘Why are you not standing up? Why are you not saying something?”

Ms. Lyons words were sincere and brave. But to the Jewish community, alas, the information she shared did not surprise.  Civil society – especially our elected leadership – has failed in standing resolutely against the various manifestations of hatred against Jews. Civil society has thus failed itself.

But the term “education” referred to as the key to fighting antisemitism in the title of the UJA social action missive also means Jewish education, education of Jewish children in Jewish schools.

We will write more on that in next week’s update.

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GAJE’s legal team will appear before the Court of Appeal at 10:00 on November 21, 2025 to argue that the Divisional Court was wrong to reverse Judge Papageorgiou’s decision and to then dismiss our application. As we noted last week, “it is shameful that GAJE must plead for the right to a hearing on the merits of our application for fair educational funding in the year 2025, some 30 years after the Supreme Court’s decision in 1996 that enabled the province’s approach to educational funding.

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

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Shabbat shalom. Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

August 1, 2025

GAJE now has a hearing date in the Court of Appeal to try to overturn the ruling of the Divisional in September 2024, that threw our application out of court. More than a year earlier, in August 2023, Judge Eugenia Papageorgiou had determined, in a 45-page decision, that GAJE should be granted an opportunity to argue its case in court on its merits. The Divisional Court reversed the decision by Judge Papageorgiou.

GAJE’s legal team will appear before the Court of Appeal at 10:00 on November 21, 2025 to argue that the Divisional Court was wrong to reverse the Papageorgiou decision and to dismiss our application. Our team must persuade the Court of Appeal that the Divisional erred in applying the legal test for dismissing a case before a trial or hearing.

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As if members of our community needed further evidence of the increasing inhospitability of the public school system for Jewish children and their families, the CJN reported last week that the Hamilton Jewish community has decided to launch a pilot project of opening a Jewish high school for 2026 because of the “community’s concerns over rising antisemitism and declining public education quality.”

“Romy Friedman, a Hamilton educator and member of the advisory board and steering committee for this new school, Ontario Jewish Collegiate (OJC), described the initiative as addressing an urgent need for a safer and academically rigorous educational environment.”

The article noted that the Hamilton pilot initiative “aligns with a broader Canadian trend [of] significant enrolment increases at Jewish day schools nationwide following Oct. 7.”

“Daniel Held, chief program officer at UJA Greater Toronto, told The CJN in March, “There’s no question that there are families who are making this choice today when there is an increase in hate towards our community.”

The decision by the Hamilton Jewish community is part of a worrisome, even ugly, wearing away in Ontario of what formerly were embedded, reliable norms of a civil, truly inclusive society in which singling out, intimidating, threatening, or bullying Jews was no longer tolerated.

The sad truth – and resultingly sad indictment of Ontario society and dare we add, government, in 2025 – is that many Jewish families are now unwilling to risk their children’s safety -let alone, education – in the province’s public schools.

And so, it is shameful that GAJE must plead for the right to a hearing in court on the merits of our application for fair educational funding in Ontario. The Government of Ontario is unalterably opposed to such a hearing. It relies on the Supreme Court decision of 1996 to justify its inexplicable stance, despite changes in the law some 30 years later and changes in circumstances, for the Jewish community, especially since October 7, 2023.

The November 21 hearing will determine whether GAJE will be granted the right to do so.

If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com

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The CJN article is available at: https://thecjn.ca/news/hamiltons-jewish-community-planning-to-launch-a-new-high-school-in-response-to-rising-antisemitism/#:~:text=Ontario%20Jewish%20Collegiate%20intends%20to,if%20enrolment%20figures%20are%20met.&text=A%20pilot%20project%20to%20establish,and%20declining%20public%20education%20quality

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Shabbat shalom. Am Yisrael Chai

Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)

July 25, 2025