Photo: Magen Abraham Synagogue, Ahmedabad. Photo by Emmanuel Dyan, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
In 2010, photographer Bindi Sheth was searching for a new project, feeling creatively stuck. Through a chance connection, she met Esther David, an Indian Jewish writer and art critic who had grown up in Ahmedabad. That meeting led Sheth into the small, largely unseen world of the city’s Bene Israel community, and over the next three years she produced one of the most thorough photographic records ever made of a single Bene Israel congregation.
An Overlooked Community
The Bene Israel have lived in India for roughly 2,000 years, according to community tradition, after their ancestors arrived following a shipwreck near Alibaug on India’s western coast. Unlike the Parsi community, whose food, dress, and customs are widely recognized across Mumbai and Gujarat, the Bene Israel have blended so thoroughly into Indian life that outsiders often cannot distinguish them by food, clothing, or jewelry alone. Their distinctiveness lies instead in quieter details of ritual and memory, the kind that only become visible when someone spends real time inside the community.
Ahmedabad’s Jewish community centers on the Magen Abraham Synagogue, tucked into the old part of the city, a neighborhood that has remained largely unchanged for decades and sits close to both Muslim and Hindu populations. Many Bene Israel families in Ahmedabad have since moved to newer parts of the city, but some, like longtime caretakers Johnnybhai and his wife Julieben, have stayed close to the synagogue itself, helping conduct prayers and organize community meals.
Gaining Access to a Private World
Sheth has said the community was not initially welcoming of an outsider photographing personal rituals and family milestones. Knowing Marathi helped her build trust, as did simply showing up again and again over three years, from 2010 to 2013, a project funded in part by a grant from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in the United States. David briefed her before each event so she understood what she was about to witness, and afterward the two women would review the images together, sometimes noticing details in the photographs that David herself, despite a lifetime in the community, had never consciously registered before.
Over time, Sheth became enough of a fixture that she began receiving wedding invitations directly. She photographed birthday parties held in restaurants, weddings at clubs, baby showers inside family homes, and burials at the community cemetery. She was present for Hanukkah celebrations marking the historical triumph over religious persecution, and for Passover, which commemorates the liberation from slavery in Egypt.
Yom Kippur From the Women’s Gallery
Some of Sheth’s most striking images came from constraints rather than access. During Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the synagogue was draped in white sheets as a symbol of purity, and Sheth was permitted to photograph only from the women’s gallery on the upper floor, since the main prayer hall has traditionally been segregated by gender. Shooting from that elevated, restricted vantage point, she captured a quiet, top-down view of the congregation in prayer that conveys the reverence of the occasion despite, or perhaps because of, the physical distance imposed on her.
Food became another way into the community’s specific identity. Sheth photographed the malida platter, a ritual offering made for the prophet Elijah using dates, pomegranate, rose petals, fruit, and poha, or flattened rice, mixed with sugar and coconut. She documented matzoh bread prepared for Passover and the specific sweets and savories served during Yom Kippur observances. She also photographed Sukkot, the harvest festival commemorating the Israelites’ forty years wandering the desert, when temporary booths decorated with palm leaves, fruit, and corn are built and decorated by the community.
One of the final images in Sheth’s series shows the tools used for a circumcision ceremony, laid out with quiet precision on a clean white cloth, a small, intimate photograph of a rite that marks entry into the covenant.
A Community in Transition
Gujarat’s Bene Israel population has followed the same broad pattern seen among Jewish communities elsewhere in India: steady emigration to Israel, particularly after 1948, combined with movement to larger Indian cities such as Mumbai in search of work and marriage prospects within the shrinking community. Ahmedabad’s congregation, once large enough to sustain a full calendar of communal religious life, now numbers only a small fraction of its former size, a reality that gave Sheth’s project a particular urgency even before either she or David fully understood how significant the record would become.
This demographic decline is precisely what makes photographic documentation so valuable. Oral histories and written accounts can describe a wedding or a Yom Kippur service, but they cannot easily convey the specific arrangement of a malida platter, the exact posture of prayer inside a century-old synagogue, or the expression on a caretaker’s face while preparing a Torah ark for a holiday few outsiders will ever witness. Sheth’s photographs fill that gap, translating lived religious practice into a visual record that will outlast the generation that practiced it.
The Photographer’s Method
Sheth’s approach was notably different from a typical documentary assignment. Rather than parachuting in for a single event, she committed to three years of repeated visits, allowing relationships to deepen gradually rather than trying to extract access quickly. This slow method is part of why her photographs feel intimate rather than observational. Community members stopped performing for the camera and simply allowed her to be present, the same way a family member or neighbor might be present.
Esther David’s role as both cultural interpreter and co-curator was equally important. As a Bene Israel writer who had spent her life inside the community, David could explain the significance of rituals that might otherwise appear purely visual or decorative to an outsider, ensuring that Sheth’s photographs were paired with accurate context rather than guesswork. Their collaboration illustrates a broader principle in documenting minority religious communities: photography paired with informed cultural interpretation tends to produce a far richer record than images alone.
From Camera Roll to National Exhibition
Sheth’s photographs eventually became part of a larger exhibition titled Hodu and the Jews, displayed at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi and co-curated by author and art collector Kenneth X Robbins alongside Esther David. The exhibition traced the broader social, cultural, and political history of Jewish communities in India, covering their presence in cinema, business, politics, literature, and art, and using architectural models of homes and synagogues alongside Sheth’s photographs.
One striking installation at the exhibition’s entrance, created by artist Anchia Anzi, reimagines the genizah at Kolkata’s Jewish cemetery, a storage structure used to hold worn or damaged religious texts before they are ceremonially buried. Kolkata’s cemetery has two such genizahs, one a small domed repository accessible through a window, the other sealed permanently underground according to Jewish custom, and the installation used this dual structure as a way of thinking about how history itself is preserved, obscured, and eventually buried again by the act of studying it.
Robbins has noted that the Bene Israel consider India their motherland and Israel their fatherland, and that the community has experienced remarkably little anti-Semitism across two millennia in the country. That relative safety allowed Bene Israel families to freely adopt Indian customs, from mehendi ceremonies at weddings to the use of coconut, betel leaf, and marigolds in religious rituals, while still preserving core Jewish practices and biblical names passed down through generations.
Why These Photographs Matter
Sheth’s three years with Ahmedabad’s Bene Israel community produced something rare: a sustained, trusted, insider-level photographic record of a Jewish community that has continued to shrink through emigration to Israel in the decades since. Because Sheth was present for the full cycle of community life, from births to burials, weddings to circumcisions, ordinary Shabbat meals to the holiest day of the year, her photographs capture a level of texture and specificity that a single visit or formal portrait session could never achieve.
Read together with the broader work of scholars and archivists documenting Jewish communities across India, Sheth’s photo essay stands as an important visual record of a community that, in her own words and David’s curatorial notes, has quietly maintained its identity in India for two thousand years. For readers interested in how other Jewish photographic archives in India have preserved similar memories, our article on Recalling Jewish Calcutta documents a comparable effort in Kolkata, while our profile of the Bene Israel kirtan tradition explores another dimension of the community’s distinctive religious life.
The original photo essay documenting Sheth’s work was published by Scroll.in in 2017, and remains one of the most detailed public accounts of her project available online.