Replying to the attacks on the proposed Jewish School Law of the Province of Quebec, which will come up before the Legislature as a Governmental measure, Premier Taschereau of Quebec issued a letter to His Eminence Cardinal Rouleau of Quebec City, in which he defends the proposed school measure. He emphatically declared that the projected law applies solely to the Island of Montreal, and not to the whole province, as both Cardinal Rouleau and Archbishop Gautier of Montreal had stated.
“You further state,” the Premier continues in his letter, “‘to ensure the education of Jews, is it necessary to falsify our educational system?’ But I ask how we will falsify it by giving the Jews, who are nearly as numerous as Protestants in Montreal, their own schools. This system, moreover, will not interfere in any manner with Catholic schools, which will be in no way affected.
“And I ask what effect our refusal to grant separate schools to Jews in view of the opposition of the Episcopate, would have on other provinces, where our compatriots are fighting for separate schools. We refuse to receive Jewish children in Protestant schools, except under certain conditions which fathers of families believe unacceptable. Are we to leave these 12,000 children (there are 12,000 Jewish children in the city of Montreal alone) in the streets, without education and without schools, on September 1 next, when the Protestants have solemnly informed us that they will not receive them? I have no hesitation in informing you that if we do not find a satisfactory solution to this problem, we will give birth in this Province to an excessively dangerous agitation, the consequences of which it is difficult at this moment to appreciate.
“There is talk of postponing our projected law until later. But we have already been faced with this problem for the last five years, the question having gone as far as the Privy Council, and I do not believe that it is in our Province’s interest to let the Privy Council settle this problem. It would be much better for us to settle it ourselves.”
The Jewish school question in Montreal, which has now at last been definitely settled by the granting of separate schools to the Jews of the Canadian metropolis, has been agitating the Jewish community there for the past few years. According to an arrangement with the Protestants made a generation ago, the Jews of Montreal have been sending their children to the Protestant schools there, since in Montreal and in the entire Province of Quebec there is no unified secular public school system such as exists in the
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
