The end of the school year compels us to say “thank you” to the men and women into whose care – for the near holy purpose of educating and inculcating information, knowledge and values – we entrust our children. Those men and women are not only teachers. They are administrators, custodial staff and volunteers as well.

But in this missive we focus on teachers.

In an article published on eJewishPhilanthropy entitled “Jewish Life Made Me Feel Visible: The Purpose of Our Work Engaging Jewish Youth”, Mark S. Young offers a concise, potent definition of one of the main aims of teaching Judaism.

(I paraphrase his statement.)

Jewish educators, professionals, and leaders do their jobs well, when they enable youth, and adults to love and embrace Judaism and help create the path to becoming “visible”, i.e., “not only for others to see me for what I authentically have to offer but visibility for me to see myself for what I can offer.”

Young describes how Jewish life made him feel visible.

“How does Jewish life accomplish this? I argue that its primarily through harnessing the values we hold so dear. We are all created in the image of a being bigger then ourselves. We are all creatures in service to a world and not looking at the world as in service to us. We are all commanded to supporting each other’s path to self-sufficiency and perhaps also self-actualization. We don’t always bring up these value statements when we play capture the flag or attempt the zip-line on the ropes course or during a late night song-session or climbing Masada or preparing for b’nai mitzvah or confirmation. It’s all there though, and it’s really special.”

Young’s thoughtful meditation is broader than a plea for formal Jewish education. His jumping off point is the Tony Award winning musical Dear Evan Hansen. Young uses the musical and its central thematic struggle as the literary device weaving his message about the educator’s role in helping bring children to embrace the unique majesty of Jewish life.

It is not by accident that our Sages decreed that the first Kaddish recited by mourners in the daily Shacharit service is dedicated to our teachers and to their students and to their students in turn. In keeping therefore with our tradition, GAJE conveys its deeply felt appreciation to all of the individuals who help to educate our children.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Yasher Ko’ach to our schools and to our community! By all accounts, this week’s Raise Toronto–Rise up for Jewish Education 24-hour fundraising campaign for GTA Jewish day schools was a huge success.

The campaign raised over $1,900,000, nearly double its goal of $1,000,000, and each of the nine participating schools exceeded its own fundraising target. There were over 2400 separate donations. This campaign, which was initiated by the schools themselves, shows what they, and our community as a whole, can accomplish by working together.

Now we need to follow up. We must ensure that the donated money will be used responsibly, to reduce tuition and to provide tuition assistance to families.

This is what GAJE is asking you to do:

1. Send a message to the school of your choice. Address your email to the chair of the board and the head of school demanding transparency about how the monies are used, and urging that donations be used to reduce tuition fees and increase tuition assistance. For a list of the school contacts, see https://gaje.ca/school-contacts/.

2. Send the same message to Adam Minsky, President and CEO of UJA Federation of Greater Toronto (aminsky@ujafed.org). Tell UJA that reducing tuition fees and increasing tuition assistance are the top priorities for our community.

3. Send a copy of your messages to us at GAJE (info@gaje.ca).

Together we must ensure that the legacy of this campaign is another step along the path of making Jewish day school affordable for all families.

Shabbat shalom,

GAJE

Rise up Toronto–Rise up for Jewish Education is the unprecedented combined fundraising effort of 14 Toronto day schools on June 20, 2017. Each school is conducting a telethon to contact donors.

For just 24 hours, from 12 PM June 20th to 12 PM June 21st, every donation will be QUADRUPLED by generous donors.

GAJE urges you to donate to the school of your choice on June 20th. When the telethon contacts you, please designate your donation for tuition reduction and tuition assistance to families.

GAJE endorses donating to our schools as a vital part of our goal to help make Jewish day school education affordable for all.

Whichever school you support, please do the following:

1. Write to the school and tell the board and the head of school that reducing tuition fees and increasing tuition assistance are the top priorities for the school. For a list of school contacts, see here.

2. Send the same message to Adam Minsky, President and CEO of UJA Federation of Greater Toronto (aminsky@ujafed.org). Tell UJA that reducing tuition fees and increasing tuition assistance are the top priorities for our community.

3. Send a copy of your message to us at GAJE (info@gaje.ca).

The Rise up Toronto campaign is a great opportunity to support our schools and make Jewish education affordable. The dramatic tuition reductions at CHAT and the B’nai Akiva schools show the way forward. Wonderful as they are, they must be expanded to all the schools and many more families.

This is your chance to make an impact on affordability, support your school of choice and deliver a message that reducing tuition fees and increasing tuition assistance are top priorities.

Visit charidy.com/RAISETORONTO on June 20th to rise up! Spread the word!

The Jewish People Policy Institute, the forward-looking think tank focused on the Jewish future based in Jerusalem, has released two action-oriented papers dealing with concerns for Jewish continuity in North America. eJewish Philanthropy introduced the articles on its website.

Family, Engagement, and Jewish Continuity among American Jews, was prepared at JPPI by Profs. Sylvia Barack Fishman and Steven M. Cohen. The authors surmise that considerable disturbing evidence points to deeply challenging trends in America’s Jewish families – late marriage, intermarriage, reduced child-bearing and non-Jewish child-rearing. Nevertheless, prominent Jewish thought leaders are sharply divided over the state of the Jewish family and its implications for the Jewish future.

Fishman and Cohen contribute to this policy-related discourse by demonstrating that Jewish social networks (spouse and close friends), Jewish education, Jewish family formation, and Jewish inter-generational continuity mutually reinforce one another. They postulate that Jewish personal relationships nurture more Jewish engagement; and the more Jewishly engaged develop and sustain more Jewish personal relationships. Hence, fewer Jewish relationships mean less engagement and fewer Jews; and less engagement and fewer Jews mean fewer personal relationships among Jews in families or among friends.

The second paper – Learning Jewishness, Jewish Education, and Jewish Identity – was prepared under the lead of Prof. Barack Fishman and Dr. Shlomo Fischer, a JPPI Senior Fellow in cooperation with the Institute’s experts in the field. The paper summarizes the latest quantitative and qualitative research on Jewish identity formation for each point of intervention along the Jewish life cycle: early childhood, elementary and middle school, adolescence, college years, and emerging adulthood. The research findings in the paper are analyzed in light of the theoretical perspectives of social networks and social capital.

Both articles are a trove of insights and more importantly, typical of the JPPI, they also offer policy suggestions for the steps that ought to be taken if we are to achieve our objectives for our children and the future of the Jewish people.

Jewish education is the linchpin throughout the key lifecycle stages of our children’s lives in ensuring Jewish continuity. Its role is ever more crucial, the authors of the studies conclude, given the expanding importance of the complex, reinforcing construct of our children’s social network.

There can be no doubt that we – as a community – must move heaven and earth to enable as many children as possible to receive a Jewish education. For the sake of the children, of course, but equally for the sake of the community that we must ensure will remain thriving, diverse, creative and Jewish for all time to come.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Attitudes towards Ontario’s unfair educational funding policies appear to be changing. And it is not just the families of children in Jewish schools that feel affronted.

The Toronto Star reported this week that  “a small grassroots coalition plans to launch a legal challenge against separate school funding in Ontario.” (The article was posted on GAJE’s Facebook page.)

“Why do we only fund Catholic separate schools in 2017 in Ontario, which is a very diverse province?” says Reva Landau of Toronto, who founded One Public Education Now (OPEN), about a year ago,” told The Star.

At this point, it is unclear how the position advocated by OPEN meshes with the views of Jewish educational officials. However, to the extent that the resulting ultimate funding policy mirrors that in the province of Quebec, one would think that Jewish families in Ontario would be delighted. Quebec demands a single province-wide educational curriculum. But it makes allowances for different denominational curricula as well, as long as the overriding province-wide curriculum is also followed and respected. Moreover, and most important for our purposes, Quebec – as well as other provinces – defrays some of the cost for all the schools in delivering the general, province-wide non-denominational curriculum.

The Star article contained a very telling piece of information. Charles Pascal, professor at University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and a former deputy minister of education who advised former premier Dalton McGuinty on educational matters, said separate school funding was “an anachronism.” Despite being enshrined during Confederation, Pascal said it no longer has merit in a multicultural province.

It bears recalling that Premier McGuinty excoriated John Tory in the provincial election campaign for suggesting a pilot project of fair educational funding precisely because it would tear away at the multicultural fabric of the province by undermining our excellent public school system.

Pascal said that perhaps a legal challenge will “change the landscape” sufficiently to prod the politicians.

If falls to all of us to keep up the momentum in changing the landscape.

We must never give up or surrender to the feelings of helplessness wrought by the legal enshrinement some 21 years ago of profound discrimination by the Province of Ontario in educational funding.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Two weeks ago, The CJN published a commentary by David Weitzner, an assistant professor of strategy at the Schulich School of Business at York University, in which he urged community leaders to “talk tachlis” about the future of our troubled day school system.

“If the stated challenge is to actually run our schools more like businesses, the appropriate response is not exclusively crunching more numbers. Instead we need to gather all of the relevant stakeholders and start having some difficult strategic conversations about which missions are legitimate in the current climate, which are not and how we as a community are going to work to support the missions we believe in. This undertaking must begin right away” (my emphasis).

Rabbi Jay Kelman echoed the urgency of Prof. Weitzner’s plea one week later in The CJN of June 2. Rabbi Kelman, a founding member of GAJE, called upon the community to “act before it is too late” to save the Jewish Day School system in the GTA.

“I shudder to think that we may be, God forbid, witnessing the beginning of the end of the day school movement as we have come to know it,” Rabbi Kelman writes. “We, therefore, cannot abdicate our responsibility to our future by failing to make vigorous attempts to fix the problems that ail our schools… When all is said and done, it is inexcusable that a community of our wealth does not provide affordable (and sustainable) Jewish education to all those who seek it.

But Rabbi Kelman went further than sounding an alarm about the shaky future of the day school system, as we know it. He actually prescribed some concrete steps to help save it.

“I urge all who have a net worth over $10 million to donate one per cent of their net worth towards Jewish education. Can anyone honestly say that is asking too much?

Furthermore, I beseech all those with charitable foundations to donate five per cent of their assets toward Jewish education. The impact will be so much greater than donating the income earned on those monies. By making a huge difference now, you will be helping to create committed Jews who will then donate to Jewish causes, effectively leveraging your donation for so much more.

The strategic conversation with all the stakeholders about saving the day school system must begin right away. Please act now, before it is too late.”

We join in Prof. Weitzner and Rabbi Kelman’s timely, urgent pleas.

The strategic conversation with all the stakeholders about saving the day school system must begin right away. We must act now, before it is too late.”

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

The second of the three Biblical pilgrimage holidays – Shavuot – begins next Tuesday evening.

It was on Shavuot, of course, that a rabble of slaves began the never-ending process of being a people governed by law with one time-transcending mission: to make God’s world as He intended it to be, namely, Heaven-on-earth.

Rabbi Marc D. Angel Founder and Director of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals, brings a number of insights about the holiday in the most recent posting on the institute’s website. I reproduce only one of them because of its potentially magnetic pull especially upon the younger generation of North American Jews.

“Another lesson of the Revelation is that the Torah provides a grand and universal religious vision. A famous Midrash teaches that the Revelation at Sinai was split into 70 languages i.e. contained a message for the 70 nations of the world (understood to refer to all humanity). The Torah is not to be understood or limited as being a narrow message intended for a small sect. The Torah is not to be limited to a reclusive people living in self-contained ghettoes; rather, it is to provide spiritual insight to all humanity. The great 19th century Rabbi Eliyahu Benamozegh stressed Israel’s role as the most universal of religions, a religion that provides the moral framework for civilization a whole.”

Rabbi Eliyahu Benamozegh’s statement is clearly one of the theological anchors for the concept of “tikkun olam (b’malchut Shaddai)” one of the many Judaic prescriptions that compel us to embrace social action in the service of the betterment of the world.

It is through Jewish education that we imbue our children with the spiritual, intellectual, emotional and theological foundation to enable them to understand and then to grasp this life-affirming message of our faith.

We are reminded of this on Shavuot.

And Shavuot reminds us of the irreplaceability of Jewish education if we are to raise children fully aware of the source of their strength as contributing members to the improvement of an increasingly needy world.

Our task is to make it affordable.

•••

Shabbat shalom. Chag Shavuot samayach.

GAJE

The pattern has been established. And it is devastating.

The Board of Directors of Associated Hebrew Schools (AHS) announced this week that it must downsize its northern GTA branch. The extent of student enrollment cannot justify housing the school in the Atkinson Avenue campus in Thornhill. AHS will begin the somber task of looking for an alternative site for the school.

The AHS announcement is the third GTA day school-related announcement in the past half-year.

In November, Leo Baeck Day School announced it would leave its northern campus. It subsequently sold the building. In March, CHAT announced it would close its northern Kimel campus and consolidate enrollment at the southern Wallenberg Campus.

Now comes the AHS announcement.

Like the resounding blasts of the shofar on Yom Kippur, the latest news must act as a wake-up call to the community. Where are we headed? What will become of the much vaunted activist Jewish community of Greater Toronto in 10 to 20 years if fewer and fewer of our children will receive an essential grounding in identity-building Jewish education? History will correctly judge our generation harshly if under our watch we allowed the broadly diverse Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish education system to be so undermined that we merely watched as it dwindled to its extinction, leaving in its footprints haredi or far-right Orthodox schools.

Some people in the community have attempted to explain the recent school closures and downsizing on the basis of demographic differences between the communities of the north and of the south. But the history of Jewish GTA belies this argument. Newly arriving waves of immigrants were always afforded educational opportunities when they wished it. Indeed, in a further sad historical irony, it was always AHS – as the default community elementary school – to which the children of new immigrant families were sent.

What is not in doubt however – over the last decade or more – is that the families of the northern GTA have not been given the possibility to decide on Jewish education for their children on the basis of paying affordable rates of tuition – without submitting to the dignity-denying process of applying for subsidies.

As a community, do we not owe those families – do we not owe all families – that possibility? In fact, until recently, we had always acknowledged that we did.

Some 25 years ago the Board of Jewish Education reminded the Federation of Greater Jewish Toronto that however it restructures the funding of its many communal priorities, its approach to the funding of Jewish education, “should assure the continued existence of a system that guarantees the right of Jewish education to all children whose families seek to provide them with such an education, regardless of the family’s ability to pay.”

Sadly, our community is now reaping the shriveling harvest of a failure to guarantee – in a meaningfully implementable way for average middle class families – the right of Jewish education to all children.

We must find the will to truly restore that guarantee.

We owe that to our grandparents as well as to our grandchildren.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

In the urgent though quite frustrating debate about the future of Jewish Day School education, an argument is occasionally raised that the key factor for declining enrollments is not the cost of tuition, but rather the conclusion by many parents who can readily afford the high tuition that day school education provides insufficient value to their children and to their families.

This response is unpersuasive for the following reasons:

1. While it is true that not all students within a particular school thrive, for reasons that relate both to the student and to the school, this observation applies to every single school irrespective of Jewish affiliation, pedagogical philosophy, as well as to non-denominational private schools and public schools. Not all “micro” issues concerning individual students are easily or even well accommodated in a “macro”-run school. Nevertheless, fair and honest observers conclude that Jewish day schools – across the board – provide excellent education within the parameters of respective funding restrictions.
2. The issue of “value” seldom arises for parents, for families, for whom living a Jewish way of life with the sense of peoplehood and belonging to a historic group central to that way of life. For this group of families – not all Orthodox by the way – the key determinant is affordability.
3. Lack of perceived value in Jewish education among families for whom affordability is not a factor is often a pretext for not seeing value in the need to instill in one’s children and ensure for the future that indispensable feeling of peoplehood.

This then becomes a sad cycle. For, without Jewish education, it is more difficult to instill and inculcate that feeling of purpose and delight that accompanies the feeling of belonging to the Jewish people.

And so, in relation to explaining a family’s educational choices for its children on the perceived lack of “value” of Jewish education, we bring the following to the attention of our readers.

In his response to the essay we published in this space last week by Dr. Barry W. Holtz on desired outcomes of Jewish education, Dr. David Bryfman, the chief innovation officer at The Jewish Education Project, writes “that for Jewish education to be successful, it must be focused on making a positive difference in the lives of Jews today.

“This is foundationally different to Jewish education that has traditionally seen its purpose as making people more Jewish, allowing Jewish institutions to prosper, and making the Jewish community stronger.

“Instead, the significant outcome that Jewish education and engagement should be tackling is that Jewish educational experiences enable people to thrive as human beings in the world today—as human beings, in their various communities, and in the world at large.

“This is not the vision of Jewish education as the transmission of skills and knowledge delivered by an educator that Holtz describes. It is a new paradigm for what matters most in enduring Jewish education today. It includes the relationships we develop, the pride we inculcate, and the positive emotional connections to being Jewish that we enhance. In the language of positive psychologists, Jewish education, if it is to be valuable to people today, must empower individuals to thrive and to flourish. Jewish wisdom has the inherent capacity to inform this new paradigm for Jewish education. Whether Jewish educators, leadership, and communities are willing to accept this new reality will largely impact the future of the Jewish people.”

•••

“The relationships we develop, the pride we inculcate, and the positive emotional connections to being Jewish” are very much at the heart of the education that takes place within the day schools in the GTA.

Where they are not, and where GAJE can be of assistance, we are determined to help make it so.

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Earlier this week, the government of Saskatchewan invoked the rarely used notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to overturn a ruling of the Court of Queen’s Bench that held it was unconstitutional for the Saskatchewan government to pay for the education of non-Catholic students attending Catholic schools.

The government acknowledged that the invocation of the “nothwithstanding” clause was one of last resort. But it considered the circumstances warranted it.

Premier Brad Wall justified the use of the clause in order to protect school choice for parents. “We support school choice, including public, separate and faith-based schools,” said Premier Wall. “We will defend school choice for students and parents. By invoking the notwithstanding clause we are protecting the rights of parents and students to choose the schools that work best for their families, regardless of their religious faith.”

The province’s Minister of Education, Don Morgan, had previously said that the government believes it is important to support a variety of independent schools outside the public and Catholic school systems.

Any notwithstanding clause declaration expires after five years, but it can be re-enacted indefinitely.

We applaud the principled educational funding policy of the government of Saskatchewan. We hope the government of Ontario has taken notice. By comparison, Ontario’s preferential, discriminatory educational funding policies are shameful.

•••

Recommended outcomes of Jewish education

In an article that canvasses that past three decades of communal mobilization on behalf of Jewish education, that appeared recently in Gleanings: Dialogue on Jewish Education from the Davidson School at the Jewish Theological Seminary – Dr. Barry W. Holtz offers a suggestion about the preferred outcomes of Jewish education.

“First, Jewish learning is an end in itself. Our tradition values education as one of the most essential aspects of being a Jew. About that there is no question, no matter what its impact may be on later Jewish identity. Second, giving young people the best possible Jewish education increases the likelihood that being Jewish will speak to them in their personal lives. It can become a source of values and ideas, some of which will run counter to the weaknesses of the culture in which we live. We want to cultivate those dispositions in the people that we educate, and we believe as educators that Judaism as a religion and Jewish culture in its broadest sense offers a tradition of wisdom and practice that can make a difference in an individual’s life and in bettering the state of the world.

“In order to maintain the continuity of the Jewish people, the only intervention over which we have any control as a community is that of education. We can’t legislate who will marry whom. We can’t dictate where people will live and who their friends will be. But we can work toward the goal that education will have an impact on the lives of learners.”

THE ROLE OF PHILANTHROPY

“Finally, we can wonder about the evolution of Jewish philanthropy in the years ahead. Will Jewish education remain high on the list of philanthropic concerns if it can’t be seen as moving the needle on intermarriage? Will Jewish foundations and local federations still invest in education? Indeed, will community federations— now more than a century old—continue to play a central role in collecting and allocating Jewish charitable dollars? If so, which institutions and programs will be favored with support? We do know that Jewish education will have a role to play in defining the future, even if that future ends up looking very different from the world we live in today. How great a role it will play may depend on what counts as an important outcome to foundations and community funders and their willingness to envision a vital role for Jewish education.”

•••

It is GAJE’s hope and prayer that community funders will indeed envision and help bring about Jewish education’s vital role for the Jewish permanence of our community.

We are determined to help make it so.

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE