Global mazel tov! New book chronicles weddings of 100 Jewish brides from around world
Women’s firsthand accounts illustrate the huge variety of customs associated with Jewish nuptials, while not shying away from pain and frustration about some practices
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
Published just in time for Valentine’s Day, a new book takes readers on a grand tour of Jewish weddings around the globe and throughout time.
“100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World” comprises personal accounts written by or about 100 brides from 83 countries. Collected and edited by Barbara Vinick and Shulamit Reinharz, these stories demonstrate that wherever Jews have lived over the centuries, the unique customs of the local Jewish communities are highly influential.
“100 Jewish Brides” is a colorful journey of meetings, courtships, engagements, pre-wedding events, ceremonies, and receptions. The book is a fascinating introduction to customs such as lavish henna parties thrown by Middle Eastern Jews, families of Ethiopian grooms gifting brides’ families with cows and goats, and a Sephardic groom’s hurling a glass against a silver platter at the end of the wedding ceremony in Curaçao.
“The book shows the huge variety of traditions and practices. Our single criterion was that the bride [or one of the brides in the case of a same-sex marriage] was Jewish,” Vinick told The Times of Israel.
Vinick and Reinharz worked together previously on a book on Purim and the legacy of the biblical figure Esther around the world, as well as on one about how Jewish girls mark their bat mitzvah in different communities. Weddings seemed to them to be the obvious focus for their third joint project.
Both sociologists, Vinick and Reinharz used their many personal and professional contacts to reach out to a large number of Jewish women on all continents, inviting them to contribute short written pieces on their weddings or the weddings of women in their families.
Reinharz is an professor emerita of sociology at Brandeis University. She is also the founder of the university’s women’s studies research center and the founder of Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, a research institute for the study of Jews and gender.
Vinick specializes in gerontology and is the secretary of Kulanu, an organization “supporting isolated, emerging and returning Jewish communities around the globe,” according to its website.
“I’ve been on Kulanu’s board for a long time and involved with the organization for around 20 years, since early on,” Vinick said.
“I’m particularly interested in the fact that there are Jewish communities everywhere in the world and that people want to be Jewish. This was one of the reasons I wanted to do this book,” she said.
Vinick, who has visited many communities supported by Kulanu, spoke excitedly about being present in Madagascar in 2016 to witness more than 100 men, women and children converted to Judaism by a beit din (a court of three rabbis) that came from abroad. The day after the conversion, 12 couples remarried according to Jewish law.
Vinick and Reinharz divided the personal accounts into 14 themed chapters, deciding which of each story’s multiple themes was most prominent or illuminating. Short comments by the editors at the beginning of each chapter, and sometimes before a specific entry, help give historical or Jewish legal context.
As would be expected, there are chapters on meetings, courtship, betrothal, invitations, pre-wedding events, wedding venues, wedding contracts (ketubot), ceremonies, and married life, and in some cases widowhood or divorce.
The book also has chapters on conversion before marriage and on intermarriage and Jewish interethnic marriage.
“It was really fascinating to learn about how it was only relatively recently that Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews married each other,” Vinick said.
Similarly, within Middle Eastern Jewish communities, families from one country often did not want their daughters to marry a man who grew up in another country.
One section deals only with wartime and post-World War II weddings. Another has a couple of stories from Israel that highlight the difficulties posed by the lack of separation between religion and state. In these, couples make the conscious decision to opt out of the official system run by the Chief Rabbinate.
Amid all the happy stories about couples meeting at dances or work or through friends, there are also upsetting ones about forced marriage. Although Judaism formally prohibits child marriage — a universally recognized human rights abuse — some stories in the book illustrate that there have been instances in modern times. Almost always, the underage bride is married off to a much older man, who can be a relative or family business associate.
This is discussed in a chapter titled “Arranged and Forced Marriages.” The editors differentiate between the two phenomena but point out that sometimes the lines are blurred due to the influence a family has over its daughter.
“The most important distinction is that the bride, often very young, has no say in a forced marriage… In contrast, both partners in an arranged marriage have accepted the assistance of their parents or a matchmaker and have consented to the marriage,” they wrote.
Readers may be familiar with arranged Jewish marriage through portrayals in television shows about Haredi Jews such as “Shtisel,” “Unorthodox” and “The New Black.”
One woman writes about leaving Iran for the US so she would escape the fate of her mother, who was forced into marriage at 13 and began having children at 15. Another story is about a 19-year-old girl in Fes, Morocco, who had no say when her father married her off to her 38-year-old uncle.
While not at all comparable to forced marriage, many today bristle at the fact that women are traditionally voiceless and are technically “acquired” by the groom in a halachic Jewish wedding.
Among the book’s accounts are ones highlighting how many modern brides have insisted on more egalitarianism and creativity when it comes to their marriage contract and what is said and done under the huppah (marriage canopy).
The point of “100 Jewish Brides” is not to argue the merits of how different Jewish weddings are celebrated. The book is about broadening one’s horizons and hearing what women have to say about their own experiences. Whether their wedding or marriage was everything they dreamed of or not, it’s their story to tell.
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