Wonderful Weddings

Martha Moody Jacobs

Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer

Every wedding is different, but it’s the rare one that doesn’t involve some travail and controversy.

When Sarah announced she was planning to marry her Swedish Lutheran boyfriend in Stockholm, her father, Temple Israel member Aaron Burke, said that initially it was a shock.

But Sarah wanted to have a Jewish home. There are 20,000 Jews in all of Sweden: one synagogue, and three rabbis. Aaron had heard stories of antisemitism there, although Sarah assured him she’d run into no such thing.

The Burke family swung into action. Sarah’s mother, Maureen Burke, and Sarah put together a program, menu, and guest booklet in Swedish and English.

“We sent a lot of e-mails,” Maureen says. Anne Burke, Sarah’s stepmother, made and decorated a silk chupah (wedding canopy), which Maureen hand-carried to Sweden on her first trip overseas, a week before the wedding.

Once there, Maureen secured a frame for the chupah.

Sarah and Mats Villen were married last summer on a rooftop overlooking the Baltic.

“It was lovely, very intimate,” says Maureen. A Swedish official performed the civil ceremony and Aaron led the couple in Reform Jewish wedding vows. Mats resigned his church membership; he and Sarah have joined the Stockholm synagogue.

Annie and Craig Self of Temple Beth Or have been married for 16 years and have two young children, but their wedding was hardly auspicious. Although Annie’s family liked Craig, he wasn’t Jewish at that point.

To avoid friction, Annie’s father suggested the couple marry in a civil ceremony in Bermuda and have their honeymoon there. Two weeks before the wedding, Annie called Bermuda to confirm. Officials had no record of the couple; worse, their wedding day was a government holiday and no one would be available to marry them. Annie’s mother scrambled to find a wedding site in Georgia, where she and the bridal pair lived. She located a garden that could be used for a few hours. A minister was found to perform a nonsectarian ceremony, but he suffered a stroke.

His fill-in ended the ceremony with a Christian benediction. When the newlyweds escaped to Bermuda, they arrived there just hours before Hurricane Dean.

By the Selfs’ 10th anniversary, Craig had converted, and the couple had a Jewish wedding. This time, nothing went wrong.

Tay and Saul Caplan were married in a civil ceremony in Maryland, eight years before Tay converted. That wedding was “fine,” but recently they decided — three children and 28 years later — to celebrate a Jewish wedding.

Says Tay, “It was something we needed to complete our sense of having a Jewish home and life.”

Tay and Saul’s Jewish wedding took place in November at Temple Israel. About 25 people attended; Rabbi David Sofian officiated. The couple’s three children, none yet married, sat in the front row. “They thought it was all-round neat,” Tay says.

“We got the chupah and the ketubah (marriage contract) and our little broken glass,” Saul says. “It’s one more thing (I’ve) always wanted to do checked off the list.”

Tay recalls the ceremony as “spiritually and emotionally wonderful” and relishes how her and Saul’s life experience “let us appreciate it without all the hoopla and the nerves.”

Rabbi Bernard Barsky of Beth Abraham Synagogue recalls the wedding of a family member years ago.

The groom was marrying a woman whose mother had converted to Judaism, and there was some controversy whether by Jewish law the bride herself should also be considered a convert.

This was of tremendous importance to the bride’s father, who wanted himself and his wife named as the bride’s parents on the ketubah, rather than the customary “Abraham and Sarah” listing for parents of a convert. The situation made both families agitated and tense.

The officiating rabbi had a solution. The instant he took out his pen and wrote the bride’s parents’ names on the ketubah, a pall lifted and everything was fine.

“I was a young rabbi and it amazed me that he could settle everything so quickly,” Barsky recalls.

The couple married, had children, and now live in Israel.

Wendy Rachlin encountered a more mundane ketubah problem. Her wedding to Roger Pankake at Temple Beth Or 18 months ago went perfectly.

Wendy’s challenge came when she went online to select a ketubah. The first Web site she visited had 285 versions. “At 73, I stopped,” Wendy says.

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