Imagine if a business that had been growing for 50 years suddenly, over six short years, lost one-third of its customers. Such a scenario would lead either to a restructuring of the business or its demise. Management and the board would devote endless energy to engineering a turnaround. New ideas and innovative thinking would be the order of the day. 

Sadly, we in the Jewish community are also losing customers at an alarming rate. Intermarriage, assimilation and apathy have become the norm. As the 2013 Pew report on U.S. Jewry noted, roughly the same number of U.S. Jews have a Christmas tree as are members of a synagogue. And our most effective tool for developing serious and engaged Jews, the day school, is in a state of near-collapse. Like many crises, the situation seems fine, but there are cracks below the surface for those who dig a bit deeper. 

It was distressing to read that the Ottawa Jewish Community School will be closing its high school, the only such co-ed Jewish institution in the capital. It joins a growing list of Jewish schools that have shut their doors in recent years.

I’m a teacher at the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, Toronto’s Jewish community high school. After peaking at around 1,530 students six short years ago, the expected enrolment for the 2015-16 academic year is just over 1,000 students. This is a staggering statistic, one – that as far as I can tell – has gone largely unnoticed in the Toronto Jewish community. This represents more than 500 students who are much more likely to intermarry and much less likely to be involved in the Jewish community as they build families. And for the number crunchers out there, it means fewer donors to our communal needs. A Jewish day school with 500 students would be one of the largest in North America. And lest anyone think the decline has to do with quality of education, TannebaumCHAT can boast a 98 per cent  retention rate among students who do attend, the highest of any private school in Canada.

Yet, there is no sense of urgency in the community about the declining numbers in so many of our schools, nor has there been a serious discussion of the implications for the future. Will there be Jews interested in filling the beautiful campuses we’ve built and are building for our descendants?

While there may be many contributing factors to the decline, one hovers above them all: affordability. With the inflation rate for day school fees being at least double the rate of general inflation, it truly is becoming less and less affordable to give our children, the Jewish future, a day school education. 

Many of our communal leaders feel the problem is unsolvable and argue that unless we receive government funding – something that is not imminent in Ontario, to say the least – Jewish education will become more and more the exclusive domain of the financial elite. Already, UJA Federation of Toronto allocates more funding to Jewish education than any other community in North America, and with so many other needs, many say there is little that can be done.

Can it really be that the wealthiest community in Jewish history can’t afford to educate its children? The cost of failure is too great to allow that to happen. As I have elaborated upon in the past in these pages, solutions exist. It will cost some money. However with the financial tools and sophisticated investment strategies available today, the actual cost is much less than is commonly imagined. 

But more than money – which exists in our community in unprecedented abundance – we need innovative leadership. The same ingenuity that so many have used to flourish financially must be brought to bear as we restructure the financial model of Jewish education – an education that must be available to all and a financial burden for none. 

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