At the Interfaith Bridge, we proudly stand with the Jewish Educators and Families Association of Canada (JEFA) in their mission to defend and advocate for Jewish educators, students, and their families. JEFA's commitment to fostering unity, combating antisemitism, and advancing excellence in education inspires us all.
Here is a powerful speech by Aaron Kucharczuk, delivered at the Holy Blossom interfaith Shabbat event on January 31, 2025:
Hello.
My name is Aaron Kucharczuk, and I’m going to tell you about my recent involvement supporting Jewish families in public schools.
It really all started just over a year ago when me and my wife got a call from our neighbour who told us about what was happening to her kids at our school.
She told us in one of many incidents her child was pushed down to the ground and told to bow down to the other children because he was a Jew
In another, they surrounded him, kicked him and told him they would do to him what hamas did to Israel
And it was so devastating to hear what this 12 year old child was going through – being targeted, attacked, threatened with death because he was Jewish - but what was more shocking was hearing that this was going on for a month and the school wasn’t doing anything about it.
We quickly contacted other parents at the school, the parent council, and just anybody who wanted to help this family, and were able to rally enough support to have the TDSB convene an emergency community meeting.
The meeting itself went terribly - the TDSB struggled to give any sort of meaningful response to questions from parents.
But the meeting was great in terms of bringing the community together – it was at that meeting where I met parents and teachers from other schools. Who told me that their schools were going through the same thing. All of the schools in our area were.
I left that meeting realizing that this was a much bigger problem. And I started to read the reports and look into the data - And it was depressing –
BEFORE Oct 7th levels of antisemitism at the TDSB were the highest levels ever recorded up to that point. Since they began keeping records approximately 10 years ago.
Moreover, it was not just anecdotal that the TDSB wasn’t taking antisemitism seriously…. The data showed it as well. 7 years ago it was the case that 100% of incidents of antisemitism resulted in a suspension, last year– it had dropped to 14%.
I started to write emails to the TDSB, spoke to my trustee, my super, speak with other parents more, we started to coordinate amongst ourselves, and helping each other as more parents came forward with more very similar stories:
Graffiti that said ‘kill the jews’ and ‘hitler was right’
Reports of students doing nazi salutes, using racial slurs, telling kids to go to the gas chamber
In a particularly severe incident, A child was swarmed and cornered by 40 other students chanting ‘die Jew’
And ultimately this growing group of parents decided, ‘we don’t know what to do, but we will figure it out together’ and we formed JEFA – the Jewish Educators and Families Association - and we have continued the mission of trying to support and empower Jewish teachers and students.
I still don’t know if we know what to do, but we’re doing our best to help each other and the community, and I think we’ve done a lot of good things along the way
But to be honest. It feels like trying to roll a rock up a hill. And I want to just close my remarks talking about where we are now,
has the TDSB’s response changed since my neighbour called me? Well, one of the more recent incidents involved my own children, at the same school..
A kid in my son’s grade 3 class (so, 8 year old kids) went from table to table in the class, including my sons table, harassing the Jewish students at each table. Telling several Jewish students various iterations of ‘Jews suck, ‘Israel kills children’, ‘Jews kill babies’, ‘I hate Jews’. He apparently pushed one of the Jewish students and left another one in tears. He later apparently remarked that he heard a lot of this from his father. Or at least this is what we’ve been able to gather from the children.
What does the school say happened, what is the school doing about it? I don’t know. This happened on January 14th – I sent them an email that very day asking for details about what happened and what they planned to do about it. Despite following up numerous times, and them promising a response, they have still not responded to these basic questions 17 days later.
And in terms of the broader data – well, as I said, the year before Oct 7th was the highest year recorded up to that point… and the post-Oct 7th data the TDSB more recently released indicates that it tripled from that high.
To provide some context for level that I am talking about - if we just stay the same, and don’t improve the situation in our schools, then we are looking at a world where vast majority – more than 75% - of Jewish children in Toronto will be a victim of antisemitism before they graduate high school.
And so that’s where we are now, and that’s what we are, hopefully with all your help, fighting to change. Thank you.)))))))
Together, let’s build bridges of understanding and collective impact.