Florence with daughter Geetal Aarona

Florence Manglani recently asked her Hindu husband Arjun if he had known that she was Jewish when he first met her.

He told her that yes, he had known, though it would not have been too surprising if he hadn't, since Jewish people were not too easy to find in India in the 1950s, and are even less so today.

Their religions didn't get in the way of their union, Manglani says, since they had a national identity in common. "We grew up in the same culture," says Manglani, a school psychologist for the New York City Board of Education and a professor at Brooklyn College.

Active in local Jewish organizations, she has been dreaming for many years of starting a synagogue for immigrants from India. Manglani made time recently to discuss Judaism in India, her inter-religious marriage, and the raising of her children.

"Even though we come from different religious backgrounds," she said, referring to her husband, "I think if you have a common culture and a common value system, it helps in bringing about much more understanding and tolerance of each other."

Manglani, 59, was born in Surat and grew up in Bombay after the age of nine. Her father, a superintendent of excise under the British, was very active in Bombay's Jewish community. Her father's family is originally from Karachi, where in the 1930s her grandfather built a synagogue. Unfortunately, it was demolished about five years ago, before Manglani ever had a chance to pay it a visit.

In 1969, she came to North America. She lived in Canada for two years, and then in December 1971 she married Arjun, now 57, whom she had met back in Saint Xavier's College in Bombay. They have lived in New York City since then.

For the past 16 years, their home has been a spacious Victorian house on a wide, well-groomed, tree-lined street in the Midwood section of Brooklyn.

Manglani is a member of Bene Israel, one of the three main congregations of Indian Jews. The other two are the Cochin Jews, India's largest group, and the Baghdadi Jews. Though the exact origins of the Bene Israel are not known, one legend says they are descendants of survivors of a shipwreck off the coast of India in 200 BC.

Though there once were flourishing Jewish communities in India, since the 1950s many of the families emigrated to the Unites States, Canada and Israel. Now, Manglani estimates, there are but 6,000 Bene Israel left in Bombay and its suburbs.

Manglani says she and her family never felt prejudice back in India, though that is due in part to the fact that the Indian Jews were largely assimilated into mainstream Indian society, adhering to many of the local customs. Indeed, the community adopted the language, the dress, and even some of the culinary habits of most Indians.

"For example, if we wanted to make tandoori chicken, we would not use yogurt," Manglani says, referring to the kosher law that prohibits mixing meat with dairy. "We would use lemon juice. We adapted [the cuisine] to suit our dietary laws."

To her genuine surprise and dismay, Manglani says she encountered ignorance in the United States, where many people she met had a hard time believing she was Jewish by birth. Eventually, Manglani and her family established camaraderie with open-minded families and American Jewish congregations who welcomed them with open arms.

But America afforded the couple something that would have been difficult back home: marriage.

Though Manglani says Indians generally are very tolerant, marrying outside of the faith was not looked upon with favour back in the 1960s and '70s. "It was very difficult for inter-caste marriages," Manglani says. "It would have been hard for us. We would have had to elope or something, and we would never have been allowed to do that."

In the end, however, despite some societal and familial tensions, the Manglanis married in the United States, and members of both families, who travelled from India, attended the wedding. The couple raised their two children Jewish.

When the children, a boy and a girl, were growing up, the Manglanis frequented synagogues and Hindu temples, teaching the children about both religions. It wasn't until their son, Rajiv Aaron, was eight years old that he told his parents that he'd rather follow Judaism.

"We lived in a neighbourhood which was very Jewish," Manglani says. "That plus his friendships in the building and in school -- though he went to a public school, there were many children there who were Jewish -- from then on, we discussed it, and ... enrolled them in Hebrew schools."

So with Rajiv and Geetal Aarona, their daughter, being raised in the faith, Manglani began directing her energy towards organising a Bene Israel congregation in New York City. Though Indian Jews in New York are very few and far between, Manglani became a founding member of BINA (Bene Israel North America), a group that organises annual holiday gatherings and raises public awareness of the congregation's existence and activities.

Every year, she and other Bene Israel faithful of the greater New York area -- about 75 people in all -- gather to celebrate the major Jewish holidays such as Purim, Chanukah, and Rosh Hashanah, renting out a temple in New York City's Greenwich Village. For all other religious purposes, Manglani and her family attend a local synagogue.

One of her long-term goals is to raise enough money and gather enough support to open a synagogue or prayer hall for her own congregation.

"Financially it's very difficult," Manglani says. "Most of the people involved are middle class. It's very difficult to come up with that kind of money." It is an uphill battle, she acknowledges, though one she knows is worth waging. "You need a lot of commitment on the part of the people to pitch in," Manglani says.

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