Toronto Public Health (TPH) imposed the new regulation effective May 10. In effect, current lockdown restrictions “require children to lose all meaningful access to religious services and observance in order to uphold core teachings and beliefs,” the yeshiva argues. It says staff have “consistently expressed an overwhelming desire throughout the pandemic to teach and provide religious services in-person.” The private school, on Glen Rush Boulevard, has 445 school-aged children and 225 children in its daycare and kindergarten-aged program. Thus, YYH students are “at a tremendous disadvantage in that the only form of remote learning available to them-telephone-is a grossly inadequate substitute.” When registering each year, YYH families are required to sign an “internet contract,” which refers to the internet as a “destructive and negative influence in the Jewish home,” the legal filing explains.īecause of this “bedrock” belief, YYH says it cannot deliver its religious program through internet-based learning platforms such as Zoom or Google Meet. Parents of YYH students reject the internet because it provides “explicit, immoral and destructive material that threatens the core belief system YYH seeks to instill in its students,” the yeshiva argues. YYH describes itself as “highly Orthodox in its orientation” and only children from families who accept the school’s “rigorous adherence to religious principles and practices are eligible to attend.” In a 24-page legal notice, YYH argues that the religious and equality rights of students and parents were violated by a provincial lockdown regulation and a “one-size-fits-all” public health order “hastily imposed earlier this month that failed to recognize the impossibility of providing adequate remote education and religious services to its unique school population.” The case centres on religious services and internet use. In legal documents filed May 20 at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Yeshiva Yesodei Hatorah (YYH) and a representative student seek to have the lockdown restrictions struck down under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Yeshiva Yesodei Hatorah in Toronto (Credit: Lila Sarick)Ī Toronto yeshiva is taking the Ontario government and Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health to court, alleging that COVID restrictions have harmed the religious rights of students.
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