Twelve Jewish educators in Ontario have filed human rights applications against four public school boards and two teachers’ unions, alleging that the institutions responsible for employing and representing them failed to protect them from anti Jewish harassment and, in some cases, turned on them when they complained. The applications, filed October 1 with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, name the Toronto District School Board, York Region District School Board, Simcoe County District School Board and Ottawa Carleton District School Board, along with the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation.
The educators filed separate applications but have asked that the cases be heard together. Each is seeking $150,000 in damages, compensation for counselling and changes to the way boards and unions identify and deal with antisemitism, including adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition. The complaints include swastikas drawn in classrooms, Israeli flags being vandalized, Jewish symbols being removed and students singing songs about Hitler. Lawyer Kathryn Marshall says some teachers who complained about anti Jewish incidents were ignored and, in some cases, faced reprisals. None of the allegations have yet been decided by the Tribunal.
The decision to take the fight to the Tribunal did not suddenly appear after October 7. Jewish teachers, students and parents have been complaining publicly about Ontario schools for years, and the argument gradually moved from swastikas, Hitler jokes and outright harassment into a much larger battle over Israel, Zionism and whether anti Jewish conduct stops being antisemitism when the person responsible puts the word Zionist into the sentence.
In 2021, a TDSB equity adviser circulated material to teachers dealing with Palestine and the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The material became the subject of a board investigation after concerns were raised about links and resources contained in the package. The TDSB later said the material had not been vetted, approved or sanctioned by the board, and its Integrity Commissioner eventually found concerns with some of the linked material and with the Human Rights Office’s understanding of Zionism and antisemitism. The controversy became one of the early examples of Jewish parents and educators arguing that the problem inside Ontario schools was no longer confined to a swastika scratched into a desk.
York Region was having its own argument over the same issue. In September 2022, trustees debated a proposal to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, the same definition the 12 educators are now asking the Tribunal to require. The motion was postponed indefinitely and the definition was not adopted. Four years later, the argument that York Region trustees could not settle is now part of a human rights case involving the board itself.
By 2024, Jewish educators had begun organizing outside the boards and unions. The Jewish Educators and Families Association of Canada submitted a brief to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights describing Jewish educators who said they were hiding their identities at work and had lost confidence that their employers or unions would protect them. The submission included the case of a Jewish staff member who placed an Israeli flag in a Jewish heritage display, was identified online after a parent objected and eventually left the school because of concerns for personal safety.
The same parliamentary submission described a teacher who objected when students wanted to use “Free Palestine, from the river to the sea” in a musical performance. According to JEFA, the teacher raised concerns and was directed by the TDSB Human Rights Office to permit the phrase. JEFA also described Jewish educators who said union officials used Zionist as a pejorative and teachers who worried that having an obviously Jewish surname could affect the support they received from their union. These complaints were being put before Parliament more than two years before the current Tribunal applications were filed.
The complaints from inside the schools were also piling up. A study commissioned by the federal Office of the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism surveyed 599 Jewish parents about 781 incidents involving their children between October 2023 and January 2025. More than 40 percent involved Nazi salutes, Hitler references or similar conduct, while nearly one in six incidents involved an anti Israel activity supported or organized by a teacher or school administrator. Parents said almost half of the incidents they reported to schools were not investigated.
Some of the incidents reported to the federal study had nothing subtle about them. A parent in Ottawa reported that a teacher told a six year old Jewish child she was only half human because one of her parents was Jewish. Another parent reported that a teacher challenged a six year old girl wearing a pendant shaped like Israel, told her it was actually Palestine and, when another Jewish child said the pendant came from Hebrew school, told the children that their Hebrew school teachers were lying. Parents also reported teachers wearing clothing showing Israel, Gaza and Judea and Samaria covered by Palestinian colours or displaying the slogan “From the river to the sea.”
The controversy moved beyond individual classrooms in September 2024 when TDSB students were taken to the Grassy Narrows River Run and pro Palestinian chants became part of the event. Ontario appointed Patrick Case to investigate what happened. Case did not find evidence that TDSB teachers had secretly conspired to take students to an anti Israel protest, but he did find that students from one class were urged to repeat a pro Palestinian chant and called that conduct unethical. He also found that the emotional safety of some Jewish students had been compromised and that the board had failed to follow its own excursion procedures.
By this point, Jewish educators were complaining about anti Jewish incidents inside schools while Israel and Palestine were becoming increasingly embedded in board and union policy. In May 2025, TDSB trustees passed a resolution accelerating work on what the board called Anti Palestinian Racism and asked the Ontario government to create mandatory professional development dealing with antisemitism and what the resolution called the “erasure of Palestinians in school life.” The same board records showed 312 incidents classified as antisemitic during the previous school year, a 48 percent increase from the year before.
ETFO followed a few months later. At its August 2025 annual meeting, delegates voted 480 to 193 to develop and distribute teaching material intended to affirm Palestinian identity, address what the resolution called anti Palestinian racism and teach Palestinian history. More than 71 percent of voting delegates supported the resolution, placing Palestine, Palestinian identity and anti Palestinian racism directly into the work of the union representing Ontario elementary teachers at the same time Jewish teachers were already complaining about the treatment of Israel and Zionism inside their schools and unions.
The relationship deteriorated further in early 2026 when ETFO selected Independent Jewish Voices to provide antisemitism education to its provincial executive. Independent Jewish Voices openly identifies as anti Zionist and opposes the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The Canadian Jewish Labour Committee objected to the selection, arguing that ETFO had chosen an organization whose position on Zionism was sharply at odds with many of the Jewish teachers the union was supposed to represent. ETFO went ahead with the training.
The argument moved even closer to Israel itself at ETFO’s August 2026 annual meeting, when a motion from its Peel delegation called on the union to formally endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel and align its purchasing, procurement and investment practices with BDS. The proposal was not adopted at the meeting but was referred for further study and a report to ETFO’s Representative Council. At the same convention, delegates approved the creation of a Jewish Members Standing Committee, while Jewish labour activists were already publicly warning that teachers in ETFO and OSSTF were preparing human rights complaints involving their unions, schools and boards.
By the time the 12 educators filed their applications on October 1, much of what they were complaining about had been sitting in public documents for years. Jewish teachers had complained to their unions, parents and students had gone before trustees, Jewish educators had submitted evidence to Parliament, the federal government had commissioned a study into antisemitism in Ontario schools and the province had ordered an independent review of one of TDSB’s most controversial field trips. At the same time, school boards and teachers’ unions were becoming more involved in the politics surrounding Israel and Palestine.
The educators are now asking the Human Rights Tribunal to decide whether the institutions that employed and represented them discriminated against them. They argue that antisemitism has been treated too narrowly as religious hatred while hostility directed at Jewish ancestry, Jewish ethnicity, Zionism and connection to Israel has too often been written off as political disagreement. TDSB says complaints involving antisemitism and other forms of hate are investigated and addressed, York Region says it will respond through the Tribunal process and ETFO has declined to discuss the allegations while the proceeding is underway.
For years the complaints remained inside the education system, moving from classrooms to principals, from boards to unions and eventually to Parliament. The 12 educators have now taken those complaints outside the system and placed them before a tribunal with the power to decide whether what happened to them was not simply an argument over Israel, but discrimination against Jews.
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