What an Arresting Smile

Around 15 years ago, I was photographing a kallah outside when a police car drove by. The window was down and they gave a little beep wishing her congratulations. I asked them if they’d pose for a picture and they happily obliged. I took a few shots with the kallah standing with her hands behind her back as the cops held up their handcuffs. Someone else watching us took their own pictures on their phone and posted it online. Next thing you know rumors start spreading that the kallah got arrested! I had to post on my Facebook page that it was posed just for schtick. The kallah thought it was hysterical, but I’d taken the police’s email to share the photos with them, and they took it a lot more personally when I shared the story. “Look at that! You do something nice, and people are always ready to twist it around.”

Classic Is Classic

I’ve been doing weddings for 30 years. Until about 15 years ago photos were very formal and posed. Since then, people have been interested in all sorts of out-of-the box poses and settings.

Also, social media has changed many things. My one goal was always to make everyone look their best in the photos. But now you see people want to make an impression, do something interesting. A few years ago, everyone needed to be jumping in the air for pictures. Now, that’s out of style and everyone sticks out their tongue. I’m still partial to classic pictures that will be appreciated generations from now. Of course, styles will change and the hairdo and clothes will look outdated, but there’s something very real and meaningful about a Yiddishe wedding that I want to capture. It’s full of kedushah. I still see the beauty in my grandparents’ wedding picture. Meaningful pictures never go out of style.

There are all sorts of schticky things people are doing now — the kallah’s looking in one direction, the chassan in another. I want a picture that captures the unity between them. But that unity is subtle — a picture where the chassan and kallah are either looking at each other or at the same thing. I’ve seen a lot of pictures where that unity is too obvious.

A Brachah Fulfilled

When a friend of mine was born with a disability, his father went into yechidus to get a brachah from the Lubavitcher Rebbe ztz”l. The Rebbe gave him a brachah that he’d raise him “l’Torah, l’chuppah u’l’maasim tovim.” Under the impression that he got a “generic” brachah, as he was walking out he specified the child’s name again. The Rebbe said, “I just bentshed him l’Torah, l’chuppah u’l’maasim tovim.” When he was 41, he got married. As the father acknowledged the fulfillment of the brachah under the chuppah, I captured the son’s face, obviously overcome with emotion, which tells the story better than words ever could.

Favorite Photo

A picture of a chassan and kallah in front of a particularly colorful sunset. It was a hazy day, I’d noticed the unusual sunset, and grabbed the couple just in time for the shot.

It’s Not a Wedding Without Tears

At every Yiddishe wedding, I get very emotional. I’m lucky I can hide behind my camera.

It’s meaningful. It’s special. It’s kadosh. Don’t hold back. Let the tears flow.

My Message

You don’t need anything fancy to make a wedding special. The simplest wedding can be beautiful, because the essence of a Jewish wedding is the most beautiful thing. The beauty and specialness is already there.

That doesn’t mean I’m against spending money. An extravagant wedding can support a lot of Yidden and contribute to the economy. As long as the focus is on what’s really important, that’s what matters.

The Sheitelmacher

Name: Chassi Meisner

Field: Wigs and hair, Chassi Salon

Location: Toms River

Years in the industry: 11

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Every woman who enters my salon sits in front of the mirror and is full of criticism of her appearance. Even women who are considered beautiful by objective standards pick themselves apart in front of that mirror. I wish women could see themselves for who they truly are. Your inner beauty is reflected in your appearance. Your energy radiates outward. Appreciate the beautiful person you are — other people see it, too.

Slip of the Hand

Once, I was in the middle of cutting and styling a kallah’s long blonde sheitel when she excused herself to use the ladies’ room. Her mother-in-law whispered to me, “Look, I paid a lot of money for this wig, and I had no idea my son’s future wife intended to wear it so long. When she comes back, please cut off about six inches.”

“How can I do that?” I asked her. “You were right here when she clearly showed me exactly how long she wanted it.”

“Just pretend your hand slipped. Hack off one little section and tell her, ‘Oops, now I have to even it out.’”

I’m always in a bind when the kallah and her mother (or  mother-in-law) have different ideas about what they want. Who do I please? The mother who’s paying me or her daughter who will hopefully be wearing the wig for a long time?

It’s important to me that the kallah feel beautiful. I don’t have the heart to ruin her wig for her. (Not to mention it wouldn’t be a smart thing to do for business. The kallah would tell her friends, “Don’t go to Chassi, she accidentally cut six inches off my wig!”) I really believe it’s important that a woman feel good about herself. Truth be told, I never intended to become a sheitelmacher. I was in college and working in someone’s salon just to earn money. But then it just worked and before I knew it, I was running my own salon. I’m a deep person and I always wanted to do something that would make a difference in the world. I felt bad for working in something so superficial.

But then I realized what a difference it makes when a woman feels good about how she looks. When women feel their best, they operate at their best. Who knows how far the ripple effect travels?

In that story, the mother-in-law was disappointed, and I did feel bad about it, but there was no way to make both of them happy. And really, the time for working out these issues is before you come to me.

My Best Advice

Women are afraid to touch their wigs, but a wig will look best if you treat it like hair. Brush it, tuck it, be natural with it.

The Hardest Part of the Job

The hardest part of the job is the work–mom balance. My job is very draining, physically and emotionally. I’m on my feet all day and people are really invested in how their hair and wigs come out and emotions run high. (Not to mention all the other things they share about their lives while I’m working.) When my kids come home, no matter what kind of morning I’ve had, it’s time to reenergize. So that they get all of me.

The Florist

Name: Chaya Suri Freund

Field: Florist, Castille Creations

Location: Tristate area

Years in the industry: 30+

30,000 Steps

A standard wedding can be anywhere from two to three thousand flowers. For a more elaborate affair anywhere from 10,000 flowers and up. We can be building the mechitzah, backgrounds, props and kallah chair for weeks before. There are drapers, builders, designers, fabricators on my staff. On the day of the wedding, we work between 5 and 12 hours, depending on the size of the job. I got myself an Apple Watch not too long ago, which tracks my steps, and it showed I can do 30,000 steps at a wedding. That’s 13 miles!

I bring staff with me from all over, and they’re not always the same people. Once there were so many different languages, when my husband called to ask me how it’s going I told him, “It’s the dor haflagah over here.”

Who Cares?

There’s no set rules about who gets decision-making power over the flowers. Sometimes a kallah is very informed and knows exactly what she wants. Or one of the mothers can be very into them. Occasionally the mother-in-law is insistent that she’s paying and she wants to be the one to decide.

Chassidish families generally split the costs fifty-fifty and yeshivish families do FLOP(S), but it’s changing. You’re seeing more and more families splitting the costs evenly.

A Matter of Tact

Strong opinions can come from all directions. It’s my job — and really anyone working in the wedding industry — to have lots of tact. I took psychology classes in college and they serve me well. You have to know not to give oxygen to the potential fire starters. If the kallah wants something that’s out of budget, I try to find something that will make her happy within our price range. I’ve gotten very good over the years at soothing nerves and keeping people calm.

Full of Meaning

There’s a minhag some people have of hanging the tallis of a father or grandfather who has passed away under the chuppah — and it’s very meaningful for me every time I hang their tallis up.

It’s also very meaningful when grandparents make a needlepoint for the front of the chuppah. One grandfather made an eight-foot valance for the chuppah. He said he kept it in the car with him and worked on it at every red light.

When you work with a family, you get to know their story. Anytime I’m at a wedding for a family I know has dealt with a lot of adversity, it’s very special.

Preconditioned

If you used fresh flowers, everything would look wilted and dead. You need to condition the flowers a day or two before the wedding. That means cutting them and putting them in water so they soak it up. Hydrangeas need their heads ducked into water, too.

Something’s Burning

About seven years ago, candles became a very big thing. They’re not expensive, they look nice, and halls started putting them everywhere; around the chuppah, down the aisle, on the tables, the mechitzah. They were just everywhere. My team went with it, using plenty of candles. It took me just one wedding to insist there absolutely couldn’t be any candles as part of the mechitzah— all that dancing and bumping into it, you can just imagine!

I was next to the chuppah, and I smelled something burning. It’s a good thing gowns aren’t made from very flammable fabric. I moved the mother-of-the-kallah’s gown away from the candle, and no one noticed a thing. When everyone would dance up the aisle after the chuppah, someone always bumped into a candle and got wax all over his suit. Once one of the guests even got my number from the family after the wedding and asked me to pay for the cleaning. I’m not sure being responsible for the decor means I had to, but I chalked it up to a business expense so that someone wouldn’t be upset with me.

Fresh flowers aren’t flammable, but in the last couple of years dried pampas have become very popular — you know, those long feather-like things? We learned the hard way that they’re very flammable. As we watched one go up in flames from the candle on the table at one wedding, my team and I went to every table and very quickly put out all the candles. There wasn’t a single lit candle at that wedding.

More times than I care to count, guests got up for dancing and threw the napkin on the table — right into the candle. The napkins and table cloths are supposed to be made from nonflammable material, but I’m not inclined to test that at every wedding. Thankfully today everyone has wizened up and only uses covered candles.

Flowers for Fido

We can build anything with flowers, and we’ve gotten many unusual and creative requests over the years. Baruch Hashem we’ve managed to meet them all. Once, the kallah insisted her dog walk down the aisle, so I made the collar out of dendrobium orchid heads and spray roses to match the kallah’s all-white bouquet.

Sea Change

My grandmother was a florist. She ran Gold’s Flowers, and my mother joined her, so I was literally born into the business.

When I was a girl, weddings were a big deal. How often did you see weddings then? Even in the ’60s people were still rebuilding from the war years. For many, many years, flowers were much more limited in variety and style than they are now. I’d say all the way through the early ’90s, there were only roses, in different colors, and carnations, gladiolas, and mums. Most weddings had an arch behind the kallah at the kabblas panim and maybe a floral centerpiece on the tables with some baby’s breath. For a more upscale wedding, maybe we’d do two arches and a dome for the kabbalas panim. And instead of one basket of flowers on the tables, maybe a stack of two or three baskets. No one expected you to do something new. If you wanted fancier, it was just more of the same.

Sometime in the ’90s, people started wanting more. At first it was maybe a chiffon drape and flower clusters on the arch (which, funny enough, is coming back in style.) But then people started wanting something totally different, something no one else has done yet. Today, people show me all sorts of designs on their phones that they want me to recreate, and if they don’t know what they want, I can come up with something. People expect much more extravagant designs than was once the norm.

The prices have gone up with the expectations. I do the best I can to give people the best value for their money, but there’s no denying the change in standards — even for what today is considered a simple wedding. Gefilte fish and liver used to be the norm, and now sushi is all but taken for granted.

There was a short time after Covid when people had seen we could do things simpler and still have a beautiful wedding, but our memories are short and we’ve gone back to how it was before Covid.

The Wedding Dresser

Name: Peshy Waxman

Field: Wedding dresser, The White Bow

Location: Lakewood, works worldwide

Years in the industry: 10 years

A Wedding Dresser?

I’d more accurately label myself a bridal attendant. I’m there for the bride and her whole family for whatever comes up the day of the wedding, like an insurance policy. You can hire me for part of the day or all of it. Frequently people who only hire me for part of the day, end up asking if I can stay the whole time. I’m the troubleshooter for anything that’s in my control. And at a wedding something is constantly coming up, and they see they need me. I’m almost always happy to oblige.

Not only can you never guess what could go wrong, you usually have to solve the problem very quickly — because everyone is waiting. If the kallah is holding out her finger under the chuppah, and the chassan just realized he doesn’t have the ring (someone near the chuppah was mafkir their ring and the chassan was koneh it), or the kallah’s dress rips in the middle of dancing (I pulled her to a side room and stitched her up into the dress), you’d better be ready with something on the spot.

If a sh’eilah comes up, I’m blessed that my father and husband are both talmidei chachamim and mechaberei seforim, so I have someone I can get answers from very quickly. A lot of people ask me what they should daven for under the chuppah. The list of what I do is endless.

There Was the Time…

…the hall was in the middle of nowhere and the kallah’s four-year-old brother had an accident. I sent someone in an Uber to Walmart to get a pack of boy’s underwear.

…that at one very fancy wedding with a well-to-do family from abroad, I was flabbergasted to watch the mother of the kallah pull a huge pile of wrinkled shirts out of a bag for all the kallah’s many brothers. It’s a good thing I brought an iron.

…the kallah’s brother hired a badchan to sing under the chuppah, and he went on and on and on, the kallah’s mother motioned to me to get her heels off of her pronto. No one noticed me slip behind the chuppah and unbuckle her shoes so she could slip them off.

…the chassan couldn’t find the ring and I sent someone down to the hotel jewelry store to buy another one.

…the chassan refused to go to the chuppah without the necklace for the yichud room he’d forgotten at home, so I sent someone to his house to get it (and kept the chuppah music going and going and going until it arrived.)

…a kallah started panicking and refused to walk down the aisle. What if she’d made a mistake? What if she was about to marry the wrong person? I started talking to her softly and calmly about her dating and engagement until she calmed down and remembered how much she wanted to marry her chassan. I got a message from the mother the next day, that she never would’ve agreed to walk down without me there.

…the fasting chassan felt like he was about to faint. I gave him an energy drink I keep in my bag. Ever since, whenever he sees me at weddings, he says, “You saved me.”

…The kallah’s sister had a severe allergic reaction and felt like she couldn’t breathe. I helped her out of her dress and called Hatzalah.

My Favorite Time

My favorite time is at every wedding when the parents bless the kallah. (Even though fathers bless their daughters at the badeken, I encourage both parents to bless their daughter before they leave the dressing rooms to go to the chuppah.) It’s such a genuine, heartwarming time. Parents want what’s best for their children and all those feelings come out in those moments — all their hopes and dreams for their future. Sometimes they ask mechilah. I leave the room to give them privacy because it’s a very intimate moment.

My Toolbox

I bring two suitcases with me, and I have all kinds of sewing supplies, every kind of over-the-counter medicine and cream, stain remover, and an iron. I’m constantly adding to the contents as I discover something else that would be useful.

Shhh… Don’t Tell

I was hired to do an upscale wedding several years ago for a big chassidus from out of the country, on the condition that I didn’t share the name of my client with anyone, for security reasons. I asked where the wedding was going to be held, and they said they would let me know. The day before the wedding I got a message to go to a certain address. I got to that address, where I discovered the kallah waiting for me, but it was no wedding hall. Before I knew it, Yedidim showed up, lights flashing and all, to take us to the hall. Ushers and security personnel were waiting at the doors, and the guests — who were also only told the venue at the last minute — were only allowed in with special passes to show they were invited.

So, Hair’s the Problem…

One kallah had her heart set on taking pictures by the ocean before her wedding. It was an overcast day and her mother and sisters tried really hard to talk her out of it, but she was insistent. Sure enough, her freshly done hair frizzed up into an impossible mess. I got the hairdresser to come back to the hall and redo her hair, but then the electricity went out. I got Chaveirim to bring us a generator… at which point the power came back. In the end, her hair was beautiful.

Insider Tip

Be organized. Make a list of everything you’ll need and know where it is. Bring an extra-large ziplock bag for each person with everything they need — from yarmulke to shoes, labeled with their name. I send a list to every client. Make sure you actually read the list!

The vital prop most people forget: scissors! People come to the wedding with lots of new things with tags, but no scissors. But don’t worry. I always bring everything you could need with me.

Nip It in the Bud

A new trend I’ve noticed in the past few years is kallahs changing their hairdos after the yichud room. Some also change their gowns. It can take more than half an hour — just to get a new look . You’ve got the photographer and hall manager banging down the door. The kallah might not go in for dancing before ten-thirty when it’s a summer wedding and people get impatient. I was once at a wedding where the father of the kallah took the photographer’s camera away from him in the yichud room, because his guests were starting to leave and hadn’t even had a chance to dance with the kallah yet.

The Event Planner

Name: Haia Steinbruch

Field: Event planning, Haia Steinbruch Events

Location: Israel

Years in the industry: 20+

Check Everything

The hall is responsible for setting up the accessories for the chuppah. At my earliest weddings, I didn’t check that they’d done it right until one wedding, just before the chuppah, when I heard the mother of the chassan ask, “Where’s the glass?” There was no glass waiting for the chassan to break. I ran to my suitcase at the back of the hall, where I have everything you could possibly need for the wedding, grabbed a glass, and wrapped it in foil as I ran back to the chuppah.

After that, I made an app for myself with a checklist of every single thing that’s needed for every part of the wedding. Even if something is supposed to be provided by the hall, I check to make sure it’s there.

From Zoom to Brazil

All of the over 400 weddings I’ve done have been in Israel, until October 7. We had a wedding planned for Chanukah time when the war broke out. The chassan was in Israel and the kallah — a granddaughter of the Chief Rabbi of Brazil — and 80 relatives were in Brazil, but there were no flights to Israel. The mothers of the chassan and kallah started joking about making a wedding over Zoom. But the weeks were passing by, the wedding was getting closer, and the war wasn’t ending. I realized we needed to do something. When I first mentioned moving the wedding to Brazil, everyone thought I’d lost my mind.

But I started making calls. How do weddings work differently in Brazil? What would we need to do? After a week of making phone calls, I presented both sides with my plan, and they agreed — we’d move the wedding to Brazil. We had two weeks to finalize the details. I flew to Brazil ten days before the wedding.

There were so many details to take care of. A big difference between Brazil and Israel is that in Brazil, most vendors aren’t Jewish and have no experience with Jewish weddings, especially frum ones. I had to find out who was used to working with a frum crowd.

Most people in Brazil get married in a shul. There’s a ton of security around Jewish places there. You need to send a list of every single worker with their ID numbers to the head of security. I had 156 workers that I was chasing down to get their information.

Then I discovered there’s no parking at the shul, and I had to rent a parking lot nearby and hire a team of valets.

Two days before the wedding, I was in for another doozy, when I called the band to make sure he knew the chuppah and dancing were on different floors, so he’d know he needed two separate sound systems. He was totally confused about what I was asking. Unlike Israel, in Brazil, the band doesn’t bring their own sound system with them — another detail I had to scramble to provide.

In the end, we succeeded. It was absolutely crazy, but it was gorgeous.

Is That a Cage?

Many weddings I do are for couples who want to get married in Israel, but the parents are abroad, so they hire me to plan everything and make arrangements.

On one occasion, the girl was a baalas teshuvah and her secular parents were flying in from the States just in time for the wedding. The kallah knew her mother wouldn’t understand the concept of a mechitzah and would be very upset about the separate seating. After speaking with a rav, we made a floor plan where the family could sit together. We planned to put two rows of trees alongside the mixed seating area to create an area for the chassan and kallah’s friends, who would want separate seating, and there would be a section in the corner for the women’s dancing with a mechitzah.

A few days before the wedding, the kallah’s mother arrived, and I sat down with her to show her the floor plans. She pointed to the corner we’d set up for dancing and said, “What is this CAGE? I’m not having a cage at my daughter’s wedding.” I tried to explain that the mechitzah can look very pretty, but she was having none of it. With some careful rearranging, we were able to leave one side of the dancing open to the women’s seating area, and instead of a mechitzah, we used trees, weaving them with extra greenery, so she no longer felt the women were caged in. It looked very pretty and natural.

A Calling

In the opposite direction, I’ve worked with a frum mother whose son was unfortunately no longer frum and the kallah was from a completely secular background. The parents wanted to be able to dance at their son’s wedding, but the couple didn’t want a wedding with a mechitzah. Until then my rav had always told me I couldn’t do a mixed seating wedding, even if the dancing was separate. But the rav sent this mother to me. “You’ll say the same thing as the parents, but the kids will accept it from a professional.” He meant that I’d be able to show them that a wedding in a frum hall with mehadrin food could still be classy.

With a lot of siyata d’Shmaya, I found an outdoor hall with a closed-in office that stuck out into the end of the lawn. We set up tables for the family with a mechitzah and room for dancing there, and it worked out very well. Everyone was happy. The chassan and kallah’s non-frum friends even came to dance with the chassan’s family for part of the wedding.

After that wedding, with the frum parents and their no-longer-frum son, those sort of weddings became a calling of mine — and of all the gorgeous weddings I do, in the most upscale halls, these are the most beautiful to me. I’m able to navigate the tension between the two sides and find something everyone is happy with. Most of the time, the parents are chareidi, and the children are much more modern, but still frum on some level. Then I was asked to do one wedding where the daughter was not only totally secular, but resentful toward Yiddishkeit. There were eight children, and seven of them were very frum just like the parents. And then there was this resentful little sister.

I put a mechitzah at one end of a large, fancy mehadrin hall for the family to dance behind. It was almost like two separate weddings, with the kallah’s very small family dancing alone behind the mechitzah, so I invited the chassan and kallah’s non-frum friends to come dance with the kallah’s family behind the mechitzos. You wouldn’t believe how many came! It ended up being really special, despite their initial skepticism about separate dancing, and a real kiddush Hashem. One of the guests was a writer for a secular newspaper, and he wrote an article about it after the wedding, describing how it showed him that secular and religious Jews can get along.

The Kallah’s Vision

I deal with the parents more than the kallah, but I make sure to constantly involve the young couple. Most parents want the couple to be happy and will be flexible and give them what they want. It’s usually harder to deal with the young couple, just because their expectations are less realistic.

The couple wants something beautiful, but has no idea how much things cost.

I try to give the kallah what she’s envisioning. For example, a kallah was coming from chutz l’Aretz, where standards are much higher and would cost much more to do here in Israel. We were able to give her the luxurious look she had in mind by using lots of artificial flowers instead of real flowers, arranged exactly the way she’d imagined. By using a nice hotel hall without taking the hotel caterer, we were able to make the menu affordable and in line with what she envisioned. Artful plating and careful adjustments to the menu can make the food look a lot more high-end than it really is.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 963)