Born in Kerala, South India on the first day of Hanukkah in 1912, Ruby Daniel belonged to a family of song experts in the Paradesi community of Jewtown, Kochi. Well educated in Malayalam, Hebrew and English, she worked for many years as a clerk in government courts and served in the Women’s Royal Indian Navy during World War II. In 1951 she and her younger sister Rahel and their mother were among the earliest immigrants from Kerala to Israel, where they were placed in Kibbutz Neot Mordecai in the Upper Galilee. They lived there the rest of their lives as the only Jews from India in this secular Ashkenazi kibbutz, but they kept in touch with other Kerala immigrants throughout the country.
Beginning in the early 1980s Ruby became involved with the project to collect and study the Malayalam Jewish women’s songs, eventually translating more than 100 of the songs into English. Some of her translations and commentaries were included in her memoir Ruby of Cochin: An Indian Jewish Woman Remembers (Daniel and Johnson, Jewish Publication Society, 1995). Several years later Ruby decided that she was finished with translating, and she directed me: “Go to India and find a professor” to take up the work. In 1999 Professor Scaria Zacharia arrived in Israel, having read many of her translations, and one of his first requests was to meet Ruby Daniel and ask for her blessing - which she gave to him in Neot Mordecai, while singing the Malayalam “Blessing Song.” (Song 17 in Splendid Singing Birds)
