Community Magazine February 2021

20 COMMUNITY MAGAZINE FRIEDA SCHWEKY WILL WEDDINGS EVER BE THE SAME? PERSONAL ACCOUNTS FROM COMMUNITY BRIDES Planning a wedding can be challenging, especially the way our community does it – typically, with just about three months from engagement to wedding. Brides may have to compromise on their dream dress because a specific order usually takes three months just to come in, and then requires multiple fittings. They might have to borrow a dress or buy one that is available in a store. The couple and both families compile long lists of hundreds of family members, relatives, friends, and acquaintances, making sure not to leave anyone out, and that there are no doubles (there’s always some overlap in this tightknit community). They also have to find the right invitations, hall, florist, caterer, DJ, photographer, hair and makeup artist, and so on – not just for the wedding, but also for the le’haim , engagement party (yes some people have both), swanee, and shower. All this packed into just three months. The pressure is tremendous, but somehow, it all gets done. When Plans Go Awry Now imagine for a moment spending all this time, money and effort, and just days before the wedding, the whole world shuts down. You planned, imagined, and paid for a huge room packed with hundreds of guests, but suddenly, people are scared to be in the same room as their parents. This has happened to countless brides and grooms all over the world, and it was devastating. The difference between us and the rest of the world is that we don’t postpone weddings. It’s not our custom. So weddings weren’t delayed, but rather reduced from hundreds of people to a handful. In at least one known case, a community bride and groom both had COVID-19 at their wedding, were symptomatic, and had fewer than five people present at their nuptials. As time passed, and we learned a little more about the virus that shut the world down towards the end of March 2020, strategies to avoid passing and catching the virus started becoming normalized. If you wanted to visit with family, you did so from a distance, outdoors, and if you wanted to be extra cautious, you wore a mask. With the popularization of social distancing (keeping a distance of at least six feet from anyone apart from your household members) came outdoor weddings. They started out small, and as time went on, things changed. Amajor factor in this change for our community was the annual move from Brooklyn and Manhattan to the Jersey Shore which typically happens in the summer months. This year, many community members moved into their summer houses as early as March in order to quarantine near nature and in larger houses. Weddings, too, startedmoving to Jersey Shore homes in the early spring, for a number of reasons. First, gatherings of any kind became a criminal offense in New York. The New Jersey Governor, Phil Murphy, adjusted the maximumnumber of permitted guests as the pandemic went on, allowing more people as the case numbers gradually decreased – in stark contrast to the New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, who continually imposed tighter restrictions, notably targeting Jewish neighborhoods. And New Jersey houses offered more outdoor space for larger weddings. You could safely invite more guests because they could properly distance. Downsized Weddings Gradually, as time went on, things began to shift. We moved from the phase of downsizing planned weddings, to planning downsized weddings. A couple would get engaged outdoors during the pandemic, and plan to have a wedding in just weeks instead of months so they could have an outdoor backyard wedding in Jersey, instead of a who-knows-what kind of wedding in New York in the fall or winter. This past summer, News Agency NJ.com wrote about this phenomenon, reporting that the borough of Deal saw a massive uptick in issued marriage licenses in 2020 – as opposed to the three or four licenses issued in an average year, a whopping 30 were issued just in the summer of 2020! Here are a few stories of brides who got married amid the pandemic in 2020.