Daniel learned Hebrew and the teachings of the faith as a child in Mumbai’s small, close-knit Jewish community. He often led prayers and aided at his local synagogue, where several members of his family served as community leaders, even though he was not officially ordained.
That experience came in useful in 1994, when Daniel and his wife Noreen relocated to New York after spending three years on the island of Mauritius. The family quickly became members of the Rego Park Jewish Center in Queens, where they discovered that the form of worship was significantly different from what they were used to.
The Daniels were used to praying in a method that had been passed down for hundreds of years as members of India’s Bene Israel group, one of the country’s oldest Jewish communities.