Even though there are around 100,000 Indian Jews in Israel, their history, customs, and—leave it to me to point this out!—food remains a mystery to those outside the community. After all, what’s Passover without lamb biryani?
Shulie Madnick, a renaissance woman with skills in writing, photography, cooking, teaching, and public speaking, has spent the last decade writing about the Indian Jewish community on her blog, Food Wanderings. The internet initiative allowed her to embrace and further explore her Indian Jewish roots by preparing traditional Indian meals, which she had previously avoided as a kind of defiance against a system that requires women to take on the role of domestic goddess.
Madnick’s writing and photographic career have been centered on conveying the experiences of the Bnei Israel Jewish Indian community in hundreds of publications, including The Washington Post, with a concentration on religious rites and Jewish-Indian cuisine memories and anecdotes. Her parents, Jacob and Dinah, moved to Israel separately from Mumbai in the 1960s, along with many others, settling in the southern seaside city of Ashdod, which is home to many Indian Jews.
Source: https://www.hadassahmagazine.org/2018/03/05/lamb-biryani-indian-passover/
