Elli Benaiah is a writer, independent researcher, trained cook, and former criminal lawyer, based in Germany. After more than thirty years in legal practice in Canada and Israel, he left the law to study cooking professionally and went on to run community kosher restaurants and kitchens in Switzerland and Germany. His work in food has been practical, public, and communal, grounded in feeding Jewish communities rather than in restaurant trend culture. He was born to a German Jewish mother, a Holocaust survivor, and a Indian Jewish father. His family history spans Germany, India, Britain, Israel and Canada, and his writing is rooted particularly in the Jewish communities of Cochin and Calcutta and their wider networks across South and Southeast Asia. Elli writes about Jewish food not as nostalgia or lifestyle, but as historical and material evidence. Drawing on classical, rabbinic, and medieval sources as well as lived kitchen practice, he treats recipes, techniques, and ingredients as records of how Jewish communities adapted to changing legal, economic, and cultural conditions while maintaining continuity. He publishes longer-form work on Substack (Beyond Babylon), where he traces Jewish diasporic kitchens from India to Japan. For The Times of Israel, he plans to write concise essays - sometimes including recipes - that use food as a lens for Jewish history, diaspora, and survival.
