Even among working Jewish artists, Benjamin holds a unique position. She is one of a very small number of artists and writers who are creating contemporary expressions of Indian Jewish identity.
... artistic expressions of Jewish ethnic diversity are rare. “I’ve read everything I can find, everything I can get a hold of,” Benjamin told the Jewish Week. Included in her research are numerous histories, anthropological studies, descriptions of ritual art and customs, and historical biographies.
“I’ve had no luck finding contemporary [Indian Jewish] artists,” Benjamin said. “There are very few of us Bene Israel anyway,” she added, referring to one of three communities that make up Indian Jewry.
The Bene Israel trace their history back some 2,000 years to a shipwreck that deposited 14 survivors onto India’s Konkan coast. The refugees had fled either Hellenistic oppression in Palestine (according to one version of the story) or the conquering Assyrians (according to another). A second Indian Jewish community, the Jews of Cochin, is said to have descended from traders. The third, Iraqi Jews, came from the Middle East about two centuries ago.
These three communities found safe haven in India, where Jews were welcomed and lived in complete religious and cultural freedom. Many Jews began moving to Israel in the 1950s, for Zionistic reasons or in search of economic prospects. Benjamin’s relatives left too, but her immediate family stayed on. Today about 5,500 Jews live in India, according to one recent estimate.
“I was raised in a Jewish bubble,” Benjamin said of her young years in the “Bollywood” suburb of Bombay, the heart of the Indian film industry.
While she spoke the local Marathi language, attended Catholic school — where white-clad nuns led students in daily “Hail Marys” — and Zoroastrian high school, Benjamin’s childhood memories are steeped in Jewishness.
She recalls pots of sweet coconut-milk halwa made for the High Holidays, Sabbath prayers, ornate synagogues and Malida, a festival for the prophet Elijah, who has special significance for the Bene Israel.
Other youthful visions appear in her paintings: her mother’s Sabbath oil lamp with its handmade wick, her female relatives preparing matzah by hand.
Don't miss the rest of this article in Jewsweek, or the picture in it of one of Benjamin's funky paintings.
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