Manchester, England, UK – For two years a mother has travelled to her children's school every lunchtime to feed them.
Ester Lyndley took action after King David's School in Crumpsall banned all packed lunches.
But now she is celebrating after government officials ruled that the school must allow pupils to bring in home-cooked food.
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The Jewish infant, junior and secondary schools, which share the same site, banned packed lunches because of fears that non-kosher food would be brought into the dining room.
Officials at the Department for Education and Skills say governors are breaking national guidelines and have ordered a U-turn or they will impose a legal order forcing them to lift the ban.
Their intervention follows Ester's prolonged battle to allow her children, seven-year-old Joseph and Chanel, nine, to eat home-made food.
The mum, who for the last two years has fed them in her car or the local park at lunchtimes, says she wants to give them homemade meals because school canteen food was unhealthy and her son was allergic to certain foods.
She said: "Only Jewish children go to the school. Their parents are obviously only going to give them kosher food to take into school. "The food they serve in the canteen may be kosher but it is not healthy. They sell sausages and chips and there is no fruit or vegetables – I want to be able to send them in with healthy food that is kosher but doesn't have salt or fat in it.
"The school only say they will allow packaged sandwiches which are authorised as kosher but these are expensive to buy and when you read the labels they are just as unhealthy as the canteen food."
School bosses said they allow pupils to bring shop-bought kosher sandwiches but other foods could not be guaranteed kosher. They also claimed the cost of setting up a separate dining area for children with home food would be prohibitive
Suzanne Simon, the school's chair of governors, said: "We are still in correspondence with the department for education about this and do not feel it is appropriate to discuss it until the matter has been decided. Our policy is still in place at the moment." [Manchester Evening News]
as a mancunian of 37 years i know this school very well. to say that since all the pupils are jewish therefore only kosher food is going to be brought in by the students is simply not true. one only has to see the students leaving school in the afternoon and see the stores that they enter to buy their snacks on the way home to understand the real truth. this is a school which has only halachically jewish children on its roll – but this will include kids whose fathers are not jewish. i know this as a fact since one of my neighbour’s has a kid in the school and they are a “mixed” marriage. hlachic observance is in the school only and as soon as the students are off the premises they have a free hand to do what they wish.
having spoken to various religious studies teachers in the school they sometimes feel that they are fighting a losing battle for the souls of these yiddishe neshamos because everything that is taught is contradicted by the observance, or rather lack of observance, in the home.
hopefully somewhere along the line some “pintele yid” will be ignited as a result of the efforts put in by these selfless mechancim and mechanchois but on the whole there is not much about the school that will guarantee the future of the next jewish generation.
as a quote from the child neighbour referred to earlier to my own children “i am also jewish but not like you” her celebration of Shavuos was just two extra days of vacation when her non jewish half siblings and neighbours still had to attend school.