On January 28th, I was honored to present a panel discussion with 40 guests and over 80 listeners on the history and culture of India’s Jewish communities. The intellectual Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, Bukhari, and yes, Indian Jews on social media who campaign for their community’s participation within prominent Jewish organizations motivated me to put the program together.
For the majority of my life, I’ve associated “Jewish cultural programming” with either Ashkenazi or Israeli culture, to the disadvantage of my appreciation of our people’s rich diversity. I recognized while working at the University of Toronto Multi-Faith Centre that I could use the platform I was in charge of to elevate these underrepresented Jewish voices. I chose Indian Jews over Ethiopian, Bukhari, or Kai Feng Jews because I was intrigued by their genesis story: a ship fleeing war in Judea wrecks off the coast of Mumbai, and a dozen survivors rebuild their civilization in a strange land, separated from the rest of the world for hundreds of years.
There were four speakers in total. Dr. Shalva Weil, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Ann Samson, a historian and leader of Toronto’s Indian-Jewish synagogue; Judith Dworkin, an Indian Jewish educator raised in Toronto’s Indian-Jewish community and Director of McMaster Hillel; and Anna Rajagopal, a young Indian Jewish writer and activist from the United States, who is a prominent social media personality for Jews of Colony
