Related Reading
- The Four Communities of Indian Jews: An Overview
- The Bene Israel of Maharashtra
- The Jews of Cochin
- The Baghdadi Jews of Mumbai and Kolkata
- Books on the Jews of India
On a quiet street in the Bathurst and Lawrence neighborhood of Toronto, a congregation called BINA gathers on Friday nights and Saturday mornings to pray in a style that is immediately recognizable as Jewish and yet unmistakably different from anything else in the Canadian Jewish landscape. The prayers are familiar, drawn from the same Siddur used by Jewish communities around the world, but the melodies in which they are sung carry the distinctive character of the Bene Israel liturgical tradition, shaped over two thousand years in Maharashtra and now transplanted to the suburbs of Canada’s largest city.
The Indian Jewish Diaspora in Canada
Canada is home to a significant population of Indian Jews, primarily Bene Israel who immigrated from Maharashtra in several waves beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. Toronto and Montreal are the two main centers of Canadian Indian Jewish life, with Toronto having the larger community. The Canadian Indian Jewish diaspora represents a double migration: families who first left India for Israel and then moved on to Canada, or who came directly from India to Canada as part of the broader South Asian immigration that transformed Canadian society in the late twentieth century.
In Canada, as in Israel, Indian Jews face the challenge of maintaining a specific cultural identity within a broader Jewish community that is largely unfamiliar with their tradition. The Ashkenazi Jewish community that dominates Canadian Jewish institutional life has developed sophisticated organizations, synagogues, schools, and cultural events, but these institutions do not naturally accommodate the specific needs and traditions of Indian Jewish families.
Congregation BINA
Congregation BINA, whose name means “understanding” in Hebrew, was established specifically to serve the Indian Jewish community of Toronto. The congregation holds Shabbat services using the Bene Israel liturgical tradition, celebrates Indian Jewish holidays in the specific forms developed by the community in Maharashtra, and provides a social context in which members can maintain their cultural identity while also participating in the broader life of Toronto’s Jewish community.
The congregation’s existence represents a significant community achievement. Establishing and maintaining a synagogue requires sustained organizational effort, financial resources, and communal commitment, all of which are in shorter supply in a diaspora community than in a community with deep institutional roots. The fact that the Toronto Indian Jewish community has managed to maintain BINA for decades speaks to the determination of community members to preserve their specific heritage rather than simply absorbing into the larger Canadian Jewish mainstream.
Cultural Preservation in Toronto
Beyond the synagogue, the Toronto Indian Jewish community maintains its identity through food, language, and social events. Annual celebrations of Indian Jewish holidays, community potlucks featuring traditional Bene Israel dishes, and informal networks that connect families with shared roots in particular cities or villages in India all help maintain a sense of communal identity across the distances of diaspora life.
The Marathi language, which was the mother tongue of the Bene Israel in India, has largely faded from active use in Canada, but its presence can still be felt in the vocabulary of Indian Jewish religious practice and in the specific terms for foods, customs, and community roles that have no direct English equivalents. Some older community members still speak Marathi with each other, and recordings and documents in the language are carefully preserved.
The Next Generation
The future of the Toronto Indian Jewish community depends substantially on how well it engages the generation born and raised in Canada. For young people whose parents or grandparents came from India, the Indian Jewish identity is an inherited rather than a lived experience, and the question of how much weight to give it in the construction of their own Canadian Jewish identities is one they must each answer for themselves.
Some young Toronto Indian Jews are deeply engaged with their community’s heritage, attending BINA regularly and participating in community events. Others are more loosely connected, identifying as Indian Jews primarily in family contexts while participating mainly in mainstream Canadian Jewish institutions. The congregation’s challenge, like that of many ethnic religious communities in Canada, is to make its specific heritage compelling to people for whom it is not a lived memory but a family story.