Dharamkot village near Dharamshala, home to one of the Chabad houses on India’s Hummus Trail. Photo by Mohdirfaniitmandi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Every year, thousands of young Israelis land in Delhi with a backpack, a completed army service behind them, and months of open road ahead. Many of them follow an informal route through the mountains and deserts of northern India that has come to be known as the Hummus Trail. Along this route sits a string of Chabad houses, Jewish outreach centers that offer kosher food, Shabbat dinners, and a familiar face far from home. For a country whose Jewish story usually centers on the ancient Bene Israel and Cochin communities, the Hummus Trail is a newer, very different chapter in the story of Jews in India.
What Is the Hummus Trail?
The name comes from the Israeli travelers’ fondness for hummus and pita, dishes served at nearly every Chabad house stop along the way. The trail is not an official itinerary. It grew organically starting in the 1990s and early 2000s as demobilized Israeli soldiers began treating a long trip to India as a rite of passage after their mandatory military service. Word of mouth, guidebooks, and eventually the Chabad houses themselves helped shape a shared circuit of towns where Israeli travelers gather, rest, and reconnect with other Jewish backpackers.
Delhi: The Trail’s Starting Point
Most journeys begin in Delhi, where two separate Chabad houses serve very different crowds. The Chabad house in Paharganj, near the New Delhi railway station, caters mainly to travelers passing through. It has been described by local writer Mayank Austen Soofi as a kind of Jewish dharamshala, a guesthouse and gathering hall where young Israelis eat schnitzel and pita, trade stories about onward destinations, and pack up before continuing on to the hills. A second Chabad house in Vasant Vihar mainly serves Israelis who live and work in Delhi rather than travelers passing through.
From Delhi, the wider trail fans out to Leh in Ladakh, Dharamshala and Manali in Himachal Pradesh, the village of Kasol in the Parvati Valley, Kasar Devi in Uttarakhand, Rishikesh on the Ganges, Varanasi, the desert town of Pushkar in Rajasthan, and onward to Mumbai and the beaches of Goa.
Manali: A Waypoint in the Mountains
The town of Manali, at the foot of the Himalayas, is one of the trail’s busiest waypoints. Nearly every traveler heading toward Dharamshala or the hot springs of Kheerganga passes through it. Rabbi Baruch Shenhav founded the Manali Chabad house to serve this constant flow of visitors alongside a small resident Jewish expatriate community. On an ordinary day roughly a hundred people stop by, and on Shabbat the number can swell to well over two hundred guests at a single meal. The center includes a synagogue that doubles as a study hall, a storage room where travelers can leave luggage, a kosher kitchen, and a lounge.
The Manali Chabad house has also served as a hub during moments of crisis. In the summer of 2009, when American-Israeli backpacker Amichai Steinmetz went missing while hiking alone in the surrounding mountains, rabbinical students staffing the Chabad house helped coordinate the search, working with fellow travelers, the local police, and the Israeli consulate to look for him.
Dharamkot and Bhagsu: A Himalayan Outreach Story
Not far from Manali, in the villages of Dharamkot and Bhagsu near Dharamshala, Rabbi Dror Shaul runs two Chabad centers that together draw an estimated 20,000 visitors a year. Shaul’s own path to running these centers was unusual. After his army service he set out to travel as far from Judaism as he could, eventually spending eight months at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and coming close to becoming a monk. A near-death experience while lost in the Himalayan jungle changed his direction. He returned to Israel, began studying Kabbalah and keeping Shabbat, and eventually became a Chabad emissary himself, opening his first center in Dharamshala in 2000.
Today his centers offer classes in Jewish psychology and Kabbalistic meditation alongside the usual kosher meals and holiday gatherings, drawing travelers who came to the Himalayas for yoga and meditation retreats and found a Jewish community waiting for them as well.
A Modern Layer on an Older Jewish Map
The Hummus Trail exists alongside India’s much older Jewish geography rather than replacing it. The Bene Israel and Cochin Jewish communities trace their presence in India back centuries, with historic settlements along the Konkan coast and in Kerala, as detailed in this geographic guide to Jewish India. The Chabad network, by contrast, is a product of the last few decades, built to serve travelers rather than a settled community, though its Mumbai center has its own difficult history tied to the 2008 terror attacks on the city’s Jewish center. Together, the ancient synagogues of Cochin and Mumbai and the newer Chabad houses of the Himalayas show two very different kinds of Jewish presence in India, one rooted in centuries of settlement and the other built around a generation of travelers passing through.