Weddings Today Versus Weddings Of Old
A discussion in the dead of night, to the sound of missiles and interceptions
By: Yaakov Rosenfeld
Yes, they did “business”!
At the height of wedding season, the Jews of Israel were doomed to enter shelters and wait in fear for the sounds of missiles that can destroy and kill. The streets of the charedi (ultra-Orthodox) cities, which are normally bustling on these days of joy with the sounds of men, women, and children making their way to cheerful and sparkling weddings, and returning from them with sounds of joy and rejoicing, were enveloped in a terrifying silence. Parents and their children huddled in the shelters, and for the first time, a genuine fear crept into their hearts. These were missiles of a different kind…
In the dead of night, to the sound of the thunder of interceptions, a voice suddenly sounded from the side of the shelter: “If the war had broken out just so that they could move the weddings to the normal hours of the afternoon, we would have already won…” From here developed the familiar discussion about today’s weddings, the expensive orchestras, the unnecessary feasts and the excessive business made of every wedding. What is a wedding, the man of reason argued passionately.
Then, the old man of the building, who was indeed born here in the country but who breathed the atmosphere of the old Jewish home in his Eastern European father’s house, seemed to shake off and for the first time raised his voice:
“What are you talking about?” he argued quietly.
“The wedding in the Jewish town was a much bigger event, and a much more significant ‘business’ than what is done today. Maybe the style was different, the events were different, the atmosphere was different, but it was ‘business’, and ‘business’ was made of weddings.”
Is he right? Of course he was!
Days Gone By
The book “B’Gan Eden Mi’Kedem” by Ganzach Kiddush Hashem provides descriptive and flavourful descriptions of weddings in old times in Jewish towns, but there is much more.
The old days of the good, simple Jewish towns have almost been forgotten from our hearts. A whole way of life has been almost entirely uprooted from the world, and there is hardly anyone left to tell the new world about what was; to describe to children what everything was like.
Who today can imagine what weddings looked like a century ago throughout Eastern Europe, where the majority of the Jewish People lived?
This is a description found in Ganzach Kiddush Hashem of a wedding in the village of “Sdeh Menucha HaGedola” – a Jewish farming village, Kherson region, southern Ukraine [1], which, due to editorial considerations, was omitted from the book “B’Gan Eden Mi’Kedem.”
These descriptions are of historical importance to them, because of all the inhabitants of the “Sdeh Menucha HaGedola” and “Sdeh Menucha HaKetana” colonies, almost no survivors or refugees remained. All the Jews were gathered and killed in the Killing Valley to the sound of the Jewish clarinet player who was forced to play the chupa (marriage canopy) tune while the Germans and Ukrainians mercilessly slaughtered innocent men, women, and children.
May G-d avenge their blood.
“Weddings were celebrated throughout the year, on the permitted dates for marriage, but a significant portion of them were concentrated between Yom Kippur and Sukkot and on [the week of] Shabbat ‘Bereshit’. For farmers, this was a very suitable time because it did not conflict with the burning harvest season. The joy of a wedding in the colony was great and its customs reflected the agricultural nature of the place.”
“Before noon, a band of musicians would pass among the relatives and in-laws, to bring cheer and remind them of the event that was about to take place. If the groom was outside the settlement, they would go out to meet him in carriages and horses decorated with ribbons and flowers, the musicians would play, and the occupants of the carriages would welcome the groom with drinks and pastries. On the way to the settlement, the cheerful carriage drivers would speed up their horses, compete with each other, and pass each other at a gallop.”
“The groom would walk through the streets of the settlement, accompanied by relatives and those invited to the bride’s house to ‘cover her face.’ After that, the bride and groom would walk separately through the settlement, led by men and women, until they reached the synagogue, where the chupa would take place. Everything was set in the steady course of tradition, and even the orchestra’s tunes were set for each stage of the ceremony.”
“The wedding feast would last until dawn, after which they would return and celebrate at noon with the presentation of wedding gifts.”
“(…) The financial burden of such a wedding was heavy for the poor Jews. My father had to arrange the weddings for my two sisters and give them their dowries. And who would be happy to differentiate girls from their friends and deviate from the accepted tradition?”
“There was an eight-year gap between the sisters’ weddings, and when the time came for the younger one’s wedding, my father was still paying off debts from the older one’s wedding.”
“The holiday season, with all its accompanying joys, was a kind of crossroads in the agricultural colony’s year. Beyond them, winter was already knocking on the door with its worries and meager livelihood…”
(From the meoirs of Mordechai Simchoni z”l, Geva. In: Chakla’im Yehudim B’Arvot Russia)
Hershel the “Klezmer”
The Jewish wedding in the village was a unique experience
“There was certainly some difference between ordinary weddings and a wedding in a Jewish agricultural colony. It is doubtful whether at any other wedding one would have seen such a scene: the ‘Klezmer’ playing the melodies of the ‘Freilachs,’ ‘Bam Rimpel’ and Uncle Zalman entering the circle of dancers, carrying a cart on his shoulders, which he would then present as a ‘drasha geshank’ (wedding gift) to the young couple. And can anyone recall a wedding in our colony or in other colonies in the same area and not see in their imagination the ‘Klezmer’ band from Romanovka, namely the Bar Cohen family, led by Hershel “Der Klezmer” with his clarinet?”
“And when they led the bride to the chupa, and Hershel would play the melody ‘The Cry of Israel’ (Platch Israelia), he would charm the listeners with his penetrating sounds. The clarinet did not play but spoke to every heart, and the women would say: ‘When Hershel plays, stones can rejoice.’ Sadness and joy descended together; and even today, with my eyes closed, I see Hershel’s large eyes, rolling upward, as he produced his sounds from the raised clarinet, lifting his listeners to the heights of his playing, and for many days after every wedding in the colony, the sounds would still resonate and literally touch you wherever you turned.”
Not long ago, one of the survivors of the “Sdeh Menucha HaGedola” returned from a visit to Russia, where he met with the rest of his family and other acquaintances from those colonies, and heard from them how 1,875 men, women, and children from the colonies were exterminated, and in the act, Hershel was forced to play the tune “The Cry of Israel” on his clarinet.
And all this accompanied by the same sounds that were heard at every wedding in the colonies of the region…[2]
[1] To learn more about Jewish settlement in southern Ukraine, Kherson region, see here on our Hebrew website.
[2] From the memoirs of Israel Ben Eliyahu from Ein Harod. Menachem Ben Sadeh from Kfar Vitkin also writes in his memoirs of the events of that bitter day when 1,875 people from the Jewish colonies in the Kherson region were killed with indescribable cruelty, and his descriptions cannot be put into writing. I will only write the main points: The Germans, with the help of the Ukrainians, gathered all the Jews from the colonies “Sdeh Menucha HaGedola” and “Sadeh Menucha Katana” to the kolkhoz barn (a term for a collective farm in the Soviet Union – Y.R.), gave them a good meal of meat, and then they led them all to an anti-tank ditch by the windmill (…) They began by abusing the old men and women and ended with a general massacre (then comes a terrible and heartbreaking description, and I am not putting it on paper – Y.R.) and during all that time they forced Hershel the “klezmer” to play the well-known tune “The Cry of Israel,” and to the sounds of this tune the farmers of the Kherson settlements were wiped out.
