GAJE noted last month in a weekly update that public disaffection appears to be increasing over Ontario’s unfair educational funding policies. Our observation was in response to a story in The Toronto Star that a grassroots coalition plans to challenge in court Ontario’s discriminatory separate school funding in Ontario.

A commentary last month in The Toronto Sun by Ben Eisen, director of the Fraser Institute’s Ontario Prosperity Initiative, co-authored with Angela Macleod, a Fraser Institute policy analyst, confirms our observation: public disaffection over Ontario’s unfair educational funding policies seems to be increasing.

Under the headline “Don’t axe funding for Catholic schools – start funding other types of independent schools”, Eisen refers to Ontario’s educational funding policy that “provides full funding for Catholic education and nothing for schools with other religious orientations or other types of independent schools” as an “anachronism”. In describing the policy thus, Eisen is being quite generous to the government of Ontario. The truer, more accurate word is “discriminatory.”

Eisen makes the case that by adopting funding models that already exist in other parts of the country, Ontario would actually save money on its annual educational expenditures and likely enhance overall educational performance in the province.

“Adopting the B.C. model would accomplish two important things,” Eisen writes: “First, it would ease the financial burden on existing independent school families who pay the full cost of their children’s tuition, plus taxes, to support government schools. Second, it would bring independent education and greater educational choice within the financial reach of more families.

“What’s more, contrary to claims that this type of policy “robs” the government-run school system of funding, it can actually save taxpayers money. A 2014 study found that the B.C. model would save Ontario between $849 million and nearly $1.9 billion annually as more families opt for partially-funded schools – not the fully-funded public system.”

Ontario is out of step educationally with the rest of the country. Worse. It is out of step morally with a great many Ontarians.

We urge everyone who feels aggrieved by Ontario’s continuing funding discrimination to demand of the provincial government that it finally bring its policies in line with the rest of the country, in line moreover, with fairness and good conscience.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Rabbi Jay Kelman, one of the core GAJE founders and one of the early proponents of applying insurance instruments to help reimagine the funding of Jewish education in our community, has offered a new set of innovative ideas to Jewish day schools as a way of making the education they offer more affordable.

In an article that appeared this week in The CJN, he urges the schools “to think out of the box” by following upon the precedent-setting model last month of a co-ordinated, single-day, fundraising campaign among nine schools. “This joint effort got me thinking of other ways the schools could join together, not only to raise much-needed revenues, but to cut costs, as well,” Kelman wrote.

Kelman suggested that this diverse set of schools centralize other key aspects of their administrative practices such as fundraising and tuition. Such centralization, Kelman states quite categorically would also yield further administrative efficiencies and a reduction in costs in some areas.

In addition to the substantive benefit to the schools and to their respective parent/child constituencies, Kelman forcefully points out that new, collective thinking would yield profoundly positive symbolic results.

“Bringing together our diverse community to ensure that Jewish education becomes both affordable and sustainable sends a powerful message about the unity of the Jewish People. The tuition crisis affects Jews of all persuasions and backgrounds, and we should work together to solve it. No doubt, some will balk at such a unified approach and support only the schools that reflect their ideological bent, and such is their prerogative. But only those who join together under one fundraising umbrella would be eligible for assistance from the community.”

Kelman’s ideas are starkly fresh and cry out for wide, collective embrace by the schools of the community. Cornerstone community organizations such as the Federation and the various synagogues should encourage the schools to do so.

“It is time we come together as a community and start thinking outside the box, to help secure our Jewish future,” Kelman concludes. We agree.

And the time is urgent.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

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