MONTREAL -- An ex-Hasidic Jewish couple who were educated in a private religious school graduated without knowing how to speak French and hardly being able to speak English, a lawyer said Monday at the opening of a trial centring on the Quebec government's responsibility to regulate religious schools.

The couple were in Quebec Superior Court on Monday seeking a judgment against the province, which they accuse of failing to ensure they received an adequate education.

Bruce Johnston, a lawyer representing Yochonon Lowen and Clara Wasserstein, told a Montreal courtroom the couple received almost no secular education while attending a school run by the ultra-orthodox Tash community in Boisbriand, north of Montreal.

According to court documents, the plaintiffs were educated in Yiddish at a religious school that did not hold a permit. They never got a single history, geography, science or art class, while Lowen never attended a French class.

"The plaintiffs finished their high school education without knowing about the St. Lawrence River or the theory of evolution," reads the summary of their claim, originally filed in 2016.

Court filings say Lowen and Wasserstein were left unprepared to integrate into Quebec society when they left the community in 2010 and have struggled to find work without recognized high school diplomas.

The couple, who also go by Yohanan and Shifra Lowen, are not seeking damages but want a declaratory judgment against the province and several Boisbriand Hasidic schools in order to "prevent future generations from having to suffer what they suffered", according to court documents.

"These illegal schools still exist and several hundred students attend them, in full view of government authorities," the original 2016 court motion claims.

But on Monday, lawyers representing the province and the Tash community argued that the problems with the students' education have been addressed.

David Banon, a lawyer representing the community, says Tash has complied with tightened provincial legislation and agreements with school boards that have allowed Hasidic families to register as home-schoolers.

The claims in the lawsuit "do not reflect the reality of the Tash community today," Banon said.

A youth protection agency employee told the court that an educational assessment of 320 boys in the community found that 280 were lacking in areas such as math and reading and writing in English.

Marie-Josee Bernier said the agency was first called in 2014 to assess a girls' school and found the students could speak English and received secular education, albeit at a slightly lower level of difficulty than other schools. But a subsequent assessment of the boys found a different story, she said.

Many of the students, who were educated in Yiddish, did not speak enough English to administer the test without an interpreter, and they spoke almost no French. While they could complete simple sums, they did not know higher math.

She told the court many of the boys suffered from educational neglect, meaning their knowledge was "below the minimum of what's needed to be functional and autonomous in Quebec society."

Bernier said the situation improved markedly after the families entered into an agreement with the school board to regularize their education. By 2017, less than 100 of the boys were considered educationally "compromised," although their education level remained below others of their own age.

This trial could serve as the litmus test for how far the province should go in regulating schools not in the public system, including home-schooling and religious schools.



Lawyers for the province and the Jewish community have acknowledged there were past problems with the students' education but say those problems have been addressed.

The former Liberal government passed Bill 144 in 2017, granting Quebec's Education Department new powers to inspect private homes or unlicensed schools to ensure children are receiving a proper education.

The bill was in part a response to concerns over unlicensed religious schools, which have faced questions in the past about whether they're following the provincial curriculum.



"At this point, every child in Quebec from Hasidic communities, as far as we know, according to our information, is registered with a school board is registered with a government, they're being followed, they're being monitored," said Abraham Ekstein, president of the Association for Jewish Homeschooling.

This trial is slated to last until Feb. 20.



- With files from The Canadian Press