In Ste. Agathe, a very public wedding story

Resort town hosts Hasidic ceremony; Age-old ritual conducted in the open to demystify ultraorthodox Jewish sect

JEFF HEINRICH
The Gazette

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

"As water mirrors a face, a heart responds to another."

- Proverbs 27:1

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The veiled bride wore a long white gown, the bearded groom wore a big black hat, and with 300 friends, relatives, dignitaries and curious onlookers gathered by the lake yesterday in this Laurentians town, the two were married in an unusually public Hasidic Jewish ceremony.

By custom and fundamentalist religious belief, Hana Sellem, a French immigrant, and Moshe Barouk, an American visiting from Florida - who met only several months ago, through a matchmaker - hadn't seen each other for one week before the ceremony. They had also fasted and studied the Torah to prepare for their big day.

Their ceremony was meant not only for them but for Ste. Agathe. Despite close to a century of Jewish presence, the town has been under a cloud lately because of an incident two weeks ago in which a visiting Montreal Jew was attacked and assaulted by a gang of local youths while walking to synagogue.

With uniformed security guards watching discreetly, Sellem and Barouk yesterday solemnly observed the rituals of their tradition, so strange yet so fascinating to the non-initiates who watched from the lawn of downtown Place Lagny on the shores of Lac des Sables, where the early evening wedding took place under a tiny raised canopy beneath balmy late-summer skies.

Inside a reception room of the park's pavilion, provided free by the town, the groom first brought down a veil over the bride's face, a symbol that she's now off-limits to other men. Then the knots on the groom's clothing were untied, emphasizing the couple's new bond of holy matrimony.

Bride and groom and their entourages then proceeded outside to the canopy, singing in Hebrew and carrying lit candles. There, Sellem and her family circled the groom seven times, symbolizing the number of days the devout believe it took God to create the Earth.

Readings and blessings in Hebrew followed, kosher Israeli white wine was sipped, witnesses were called to attest to the procedures, and finally the groom placed a simple gold band on the bride's right forefinger.

The marriage contract was then read out in Aramaic, more blessings were read, a second glass of wine was sipped, and a glass was broken under the groom's right foot to remember the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Her veil finally lifted, and with the crowd whistling and cheering before the setting sun, the bride and her husband then retired to a private room in the pavilion, first stepping over a silver spoon on the threshold, and spent a few minutes together to break their fast and live their first moments unobserved by others.

The wedding was deliberately public. By doing it in the open, Sellem, an educator and administrator at a local Jewish girl's seminary, had hoped to demystify her Chabad-Lubavitch brand of Jewish ultraorthodoxy in this otherwise nominally Roman Catholic town.

To that end, guests yesterday were handed a wedding guide in English and French explaining the rituals and their meaning.

Mission accomplished, it seems.

"I hope this event will inspire others - it should have been done a long time ago, because it's so necessary to bring our nationalities together," said retired nurse Marie Fortin, who lives in a condo complex next to the park and whose downstairs neighbours are Jews from Texas.

Like many of the onlookers, this was was her first Jewish wedding.

Now it'll be up to the new couple to make something of their new life together. But it won't be in Ste. Agathe.

In the coming year, they'll move to Florida to start a home and have children - "lots of them, God willing," the 26-year-old bride said with a chuckle.

jheinrich@thegazette.canwest.com
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008

Island bride is wed outdoors according to the customs of Chabad Lubavitch

Wedding is 'a first for Manor Road'
Island bride is wed outdoors according to the customs of Chabad Lubavitch

By LESLIE PALMA-SIMONCEK
ADVANCE STAFF WRITER

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- An outdoor wedding in March is unusual on Staten Island but the chuppah under which Shmuli Bendet and Aidy Katzman were married Sunday was outdoors according to the customs of the Chabad Lubavitch movement.

The wedding took place at the Joan and Alan Bernikow Jewish Community Center in Sea View, and although David Sorkin, executive director, said weddings have been held previously there, it was the first Hasidic wedding.

"It's a first for Manor Road," said guest Anita Diamond as she and her daughter, Ruth Fabes, headed out to the chuppah and the outdoor ceremony that was steeped in tradition.

The new Mrs. Bendet, 22, didn't see her own wedding.

According to custom, her face was covered with an opaque veil placed on her by her 26-year-old groom before the ceremony.

The veil is symbolic of a number of things -- that only her groom shall gaze upon her beauty, that he is not only interested in her physical beauty, which fades with time, and that the bride seeks to emulate Rebecca, who covered her face out of modesty the first time she saw Isaac.

Tradition also holds that the divine presence rests upon the bride's face, which must be covered just as Moses' face was covered when he received the commandments on Mount Sinai.

Behind her veil, the bride says prayers and asks that she will be as worthy as Rebecca, whose marriage to Isaac marked the beginning of the Jewish people.

After the ceremony, which included the bride circling seven times around her groom and a rabbi's blessing over the wine, the couple and their 500 invited guests went back indoors for a wedding feast with music and dancing -- men in one room, women in another.

The crowd included many people who would not identify themselves as Orthodox. It is the mission of Chabad to reach out to all Jews in an effort to make them more cognizant of the many traditions of the religion.

The bride is the daughter of Staten Island's well-known Rabbi Moshe Katzman and his wife, Rebbetzin Chani Katzman.

She and her new husband, who comes from St. Paul, Minn., will spend a year in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, worldwide headquarters of the Chabad movement.

After that they will continue to work as Chabad emissaries although where they'll be sent is not yet known.

"We hope they'll come to Staten Island," Rebbetzin Katzman said.

Leslie Palma-Simoncek is the religion editor for the Advance. She may be reached at palma@siadvance.com. Visit her Beyond Beliefs Web log at blog.silive.com/beyondbeliefs.

A wedding as it should be: full of spirituality

I danced in circles with dozens of elegantly clad women as the band played a Hasidic tune that seemed to go on and on. The blisters on the bottoms of my feet were evidence that I gave it my all, not used to wearing high heels or dancing, especially not at the same time.

I recently attended the wedding of Chanie and Mendy Yarmush at the Grand Hyatt in Tampa. Chanie is the daughter of Sulha and Yossi Dubrowski, who have run Chabad-Lubavitch of Tampa Bay in Carrollwood for the past 20 years. Chabad is a mystical form of Hasidic Judaism that focuses on outreach to unaffiliated nonobservant Jews like me.

I was raised a Reform Jew, so attending a Chabad wedding was like stepping into another world. I witnessed customs that Jews in Europe would have practiced hundreds of years ago. It was the first wedding of its kind in this area, and most of the 400 guests were not Chabad. Most traditional Jewish weddings are held in such places as Israel, New York, Miami and Los Angeles.

Although I was a little apprehensive about not being able to sit with my husband during the wedding or the dinner afterward, it turned out to be a remarkably moving experience.

The bride and groom, who had known each other just a few months, had never touched each other before their wedding night - a startling fact, until you meet Chabad Jews and see how genuinely proud they are of their customs. They've managed to escape the influences of the sexual revolution and effects from mass media, television and pop culture in general.

The first half of the wedding itself seemed like a somber affair in contrast with the party afterward. The couple didn't see each other for a week before, and they fasted the day of the wedding.

It's like a day of atonement for them, a time of personal contemplation. A chance to start fresh. In fact, Chabad sees the wedding day as the holiest day of the couple's lives, and witnessing it, it felt like the way a wedding should be.

I felt it in my soul as a sea of men wearing black suits, many of them in traditional black hats and beards, escorted the groom down a set of stairs to the haunting tune of the Alter Rebbe's Niggun, a Hasidic song that invites all the generations before them to come to the chuppah, or wedding canopy.

Mendy's eyes were closed in deep contemplation as they led him to his bride-to-be. Her hands shook as he approached her, and she didn't look up as he covered her with her veil before the ceremony.

As I think back to my own wedding six years ago, I recall fondly the excitement and newness. But I feel a tinge of regret over missing out on some beautiful traditions I didn't know existed, until now.

Traditions such as the fasting, the seven blessings offered by close friends and family, a kosher kitchen, right down to the cooking utensils.

Whether you're Jewish or not, a wedding day should be a spiritual day. Not just one focused on food, flowers and seating charts.

As for the joyous dancing, being separate allows men and women the chance to express themselves freely in a way they might not otherwise. My husband marveled at the way the men let loose, swinging each other around, kicking up their legs.

As we left at 11 p.m., the party on both sides of the mechitza was still going strong, and we headed back to our world of secular Judaism. The couple has since moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., Chabad's headquarters.

And I wonder, living here in Wesley Chapel, if we'll ever be part of a thriving Jewish community - and what types of weddings my two young children will choose when it's their turn. Weddings, I hope, that will be filled with love and spirituality - and a lot of dancing.