Graceland Wedding Chapel, Las Vegas, 37 years ago. My wedding certificate has the outline of Elvis’s head on it. Really.
Male magistrate (civil official) at a police station, so not a religious setting. 42 years ago, this past summer. And they said it wouldn’t last!
Married by my father, a temporarily appointed deputy of the Commissioner of Civil Marriages, at a country club whose name I shall not repeat, in 1999.
I have to correct this.
The marriage is valid when the city office approves the application. They check to ensure that everything is valid and lawful, etc.
We picked a marriage commissioner from a list supplied by the province. She happened to be a woman, and on our wedding day, when we met her in person, we learned that she was a friend of a friend, and she has become a friendly acquaintance with whom we socialize a couple of times a year.
I’m Jewish, and my wife was Christian. She tried to see if the rabbi at Dartmouth would participate in marrying us. He downright refused. Which was fine with me since I was already an atheist and the Ethical Culture Society worked.
The officiant came to my wife’s parents house and interviewed us. When he found that we had never lived closer than 600 miles from each other, I could tell he thought we were crazy, and that this marriage would never work.
That was 47 years ago.
Jews who chose to be Jews rather than being born into the tribe typically are the frummiest.
Yup. She didn’t convert during her father’s lifetime because it would have upset him, or so i understand. But she’s the only member of the household who keeps strictly kosher outside the house, and she’s the one who carefully made sure i knew what each item in the kitchen could be used for so i wouldn’t accidentally mess them up.
I had the same question about the beach /country club. I haven’t been to a whole lot of Jewish weddings ( four or five) but none have them have been in a synogogue. They were all in the reception hall and not in a separate chapel like area -the ceremony was in the same room as the reception. I don’t know if maybe that is the traditional religious setting for a certain type of Judaism.
Jewish weddings are technically a business transaction, not really a religious ceremony. They are forbidden on the Sabbath, and other especially holy days. Mine was in a synagogue, because that was a convenient place to do it. But there’s no special reason to hold a Jewish wedding in a sacred space.
My Jewish wedding ceremony and reception were in a reception hall on the beach in Santa Barbara. They don’t even need to be on the grounds of the synagogue. I’ve been to many and I can’t think of any that happened to be at a synagogue.
At the time, we were evangelical Christians, so we did the Midwestern Protestant Evangelical tradition of getting married in the bride’s home church. And of course, being evangelical, the pastor of the church was a man. He’s in his late 80s now, if he’s still alive.
Roman Catholic priest.
Voted, but don’t know what you mean by “traditional religious setting”.
RC church has an expectation that weddings are in a church building, unless permission is given otherwise. I’m not RC, and my division has no religious reason for having the ceremony in any particular place. Church buildings are convenient, but that’s all. I had a traditional religious ceremony in my back yard.
Trick question.
We got married in 1998. I had grown up in a Conservative Jewish community in Israel; my wife, an atheist Jew, didn’t care who married us so long as he wasn’t Orthodox. My shul was between rabbis at the time, so we asked the President of the Conservative Movement in Israel to officiate the wedding, and he agreed. It was a lovely, mostly traditional (and egalitarian) ceremony, which, Israeli-style, was held in the middle of the reception. The rabbi did an excellent job.
Except we didn’t actually get married.
While we consider that to be our real wedding, and it’s date is our anniversary date, the State of Israel doesn’t recognized Jewish weddings officiated by non-Orthodox rabbis (don’t get me started), so legally, the ceremony was meaningless. That’s why a month later, on the New York leg of our honeymoon (after London and Paris, and before Florida), we hopped over to the Municipal Building and had a quickie marriage ceremony officiated by a nice female clerk and witnessed by some old friends of my parents. See, while Israeli law was very particular about how people get married in Israel, it also accepts any marriage certificate from outside the country carte blanche. It’s a widely-used loophole. So we just stopped by the embassy after the ceremony, filed our certificate, and were officially married in Israel.
In the end, we got the wedding we wanted, and we managed to beat the system. It was an auspicious start for our marriage.
I was married in the synagogue, because it was a place that seated a large number of people, already had chuppah posts, had a nice reception area, separate places for dancing and eating.
Since I was a member, all I had to pay was a cleaning fee for the woman the synagogue had come in once a week, who came in an extra 1/2 day after an event. She set the price, and it was $40 for a wedding, as long as we packed up all our stuff ourselves, put away the chuppah poles, etc.-- our caterer cleaned up the kitchen and food service area.
The fee the woman set for the extra cleaning after weddings was only $40, and that was cheap even in 2001. The Ad Ass said we were free to add a tip, so we paid her $100. I knew her, and she was a very hard worker and a nice person.
But that was all we paid for our “venue.” Albeit, caterer aside, the whole wedding, including my dress, cost less than $2,000.
I know several people who have used it. Oddly, one was a couple the woman of which, whose Jewishness the local rabbinate would not acknowledge because her mother had converted Conservative, and she was not as strictly observant as they demanded. Once the couple was married, though, they changed their minds about recognizing her as Jewish, sort of hemming and hawing that she was more frum than before she was married (she wasn’t).
I think they just realized she was there to stay, and if the community accepted her-- well, “pick your battles.”
Or, maybe a higher authority overruled. I don’t know for sure.
Aren’t there additional restrictions if the man is a Kohan? I may be misremembering some of the details but I remember something about a couple I met in better times going to Egypt to get married because he was a Kohan and she was a divorcee.
A Cohen can’t marry a divorcee, but I think there are loopholes for that, too.
Bear in mind that there was nothing preventing my wife and me from marrying in an Orthodox wedding. It was purely a matter of principal.
My parents were appalled that I was not getting married in a tradition Catholic wedding in a church. I’d wondered for years how we were going to handle this situation.
We got an ordained minister from a VERY non-traditional faith that we found in Hoboken, NJ, after consulting several friends. In addition to what we paid him, I gave him a censer (which I bought from a Catholic supply house).
After the ceremony, my mother pulled me aside an asked me “WHERE did you get thar minister?”
“Hoboken,” I simply replied.
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Years later, at her own non-traditional wedding, my cousin told me that she was grateful that we had blazed the trail for the rest of the family.
My niece and her now-husband did much the same thing when they were living in Tel Aviv, except that there was no way they could legally get married in Israel, since he was Jewish and she wasn’t. They had a second ceremony with a rabbi in a reception hall a few months later when they moved to NYC.