Celebrating a New Life Together: A Community's First Jewish Wedding

When Alex and Oksana, an Ulpan student and his teacher, decided to marry in a traditional Jewish ceremony in Ufa, a town in Russia's Ural Mountains, they were in a quandary. How do you make a Jewish wedding where no one, except for the expatriate rabbis, has ever seen one? With enthusiastic assistance from JDC, they found their answer.

What began as the couple's personal request became an international JDC event. The community soon began to see the simcha as its own, renting the hall and inviting city officials to this momentous occasion, the first Jewish wedding in Ufa in as long as anyone could remember.

To make it a real Jewish celebration, JDC arranged for a klezmer group from Kazan to make the 20-hour train journey. JDC also distributed kippot from its warehouse in Yekaterinburg, provided a newly printed JDC Russian-Aramaic illuminated ketubah, and brought gifts from Jerusalem – candlesticks, a kiddush cup, and a mezuzah.

Guests – 250 of them – arrived from around the FSU, from Israel, and from all generations of the Ufa Jewish community. As the couple stood under the chuppah, the community embraced the Jewish wedding traditions, danced and sang, and joined in a kosher reception. Through Alex and Oksana, community members were exposed to something so authentically Jewish that it will surely remain with them forever.

"See the power of a Jewish simcha!" commented one guest. "When a future historian writes the story of Jewish life in Ufa, he will undoubtedly devote a prominent chapter to "The Wedding."