Excerpt:
Like hundreds of Jewish institutions in the Diaspora, the King David School celebrated Israel’s 70th Independence Day with blue-and-white flags and group singing of the “Hatikvah” national anthem.
But the King David is not like most other Jewish schools.
Most of the dozens of students in the 53-year-old elementary school in a suburb of this gritty English city come from Muslim families — the result of a decades-long depletion in the size of most Jewish communities outside London and growing immigration from South Asia and the Middle East. According to parents and community observers, 80 percent of the students are Muslim. The school declined to comment.
On Israel’s Independence Day, which this year fell on April 19, Esther Cohen, King David’s head of religious education, kicked off the ceremony in the school gym with the Modeh Ani morning prayer in Hebrew followed by the Shema Yisrael prayer.