A NEW LOVE STORY

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MARRIAGE, NOT THE WEDDING

I am frequently asked “What is MOST important”??

Of course the public celebration of your joining is very important to you. It is a major life milestone. You want everything to be perfect! You want the wedding of your dreams.

But please take time to consider what this celebration is really all about. Take the time to put more effort into your future life together than in the minutia of details for a party that will last only 5 or 6 hours. Hopefully your marriage will last the rest of your life!

If more people planned their marriages and future realistically with short and long term goals – life after the “I do”, will be so much more happier and content. Learn about each other from a realistic viewpoint. I know it is quite difficult to do that when you are starry eyed and thinking about your gown and all the rest of the details.

Planning your life together is so much more important.

Remember something about expectations:  you are an imperfect individual marrying another imperfect individual! Horrors!! What a thing to say!

Give each other some slack and room to grow and mature. You are not the same individual you were 8 years ago and you won’t be the same couple you are today – five years from now. Love is a choice. Choose to love forever and commit to always work together. Your spouse is your best friend and friendships always need nurturing.

Kol Tuv,

Miryam

WORKSHOP FOR BRIDES (and their Moms) COMING SOON!

Tov Maod Events is teaming up  with the ASSOCIATION of ISRAELI SIMCHA & EVENT PROFESSIONALS to bring you a creative workshop/seminar for your engagement and wedding planning.

Everything you need to know to have the wedding of your dreams in Israel without breaking the bank. Expert tips from professionals throughout  the industry. Learn the secrets of successful events that are  joyful and memorable  without getting frantic.

This workshop is in the planning stages now. Stay tuned for more details. If you have a topic you would like to see covered, please drop us a line!

Mazal Tov!

Miryam

HOPE I GET…

HOPE I GET is a gift registry for couples planning on living in Israel. Friends and family from abroad can shop with ease without the hassle of shipping overseas.

When you register with HOPE I GET (HIG), use the promotion code: “TovMaod5″ to get 5% off purchases on our site. And when asked “How Did You Hear About HIG?”  The answer is “TOV MAOD EVENTS”!

And may you receive all the gifts you hope for.

Mazal Tov,
Miryam

Minimum Space Requirements for a Jewish Wedding

Please allow me to preface this: These are the types of rooms usually required. Not the overall size of the place. Every Wedding is unique to the Families involved and there are all kinds of interesting designs, ideas, configurations and adaptations according to desire and need. *Note: If the Bride and her attendants will be dressing at the venue, then there will be a need for an additional room.

There are 5 basic rooms or spaces needed for a Jewish Chassanah

• Reception Room: also known as the Kabbalat Panim. This is an area separated from the men, where the Kallah sits on a special chair to greet her guests before the ceremony. The Bride also imparts a blessing to each woman. Some times appetizers or hors deorves are served. This is the same place where the Bedeken (inspection of the Bride) takes place and the fathers bless the Bride. After this is the cue for everyone to go to the Chuppah

• Chasson’s Tish: (groom’s table) a separate area from the women where the wedding contract is reviewed by the Rabbi and is accepted by each father and the groom plus 2 witnesses. In some traditions, the mothers come together in the room with the men and they break a dish, also connoting the acceptance and binding of the contract/Ketubah

• Chuppah: The Marriage Canopy under which the ceremony takes place. The Chuppah may be done outdoors or indoors (depending on weather and personal preferences). This is usually done at the same venue (not necessarily the same room) as the Seudah (dinner). Sometimes the Reception, Tish and Chuppah are done in a synagogue and the seudah takes place elsewhere.

• Yichud Room: This is a secluded room where the new husband and wife spend some intimate time alone. Under most traditions, this will be the first time they touch each other as well as having a little something to eat. Some couples fast on their wedding day. Usually there are 2 “guards” posted outside the room to ensure the couple’s privacy.

• The Simcha Hall: Place where the “celebration party” is located. After the Chuppah, the new couple go off to the Yichud room and the guests go to the hall and find their tables. In very orthodox traditions, there may be separate seating for men and women, in other cases there is mixed seating. However the dance floor is usually partitioned off (Mechitzah) for separate dancing.

In non-religious weddings, there is no separation unless desired in order to keep with tradition.

I hope you find this guide helpful when planning your simcha! MAZAL TOV!!

New Fundraising for Hachnassat Kallah: Give From Your Heart

Tov Maod Events produces weddings and other simchas in Israel. We help Jewish families who have very limited funds to make a lovely wedding for their children. Additional funds that may be available will go toward household necessities. Please give from your heart.

Torah says that it is a Mitzvah to make the Bride happy and helping to provide for the wedding is a great way to do it. The costs in Israel are sky-rocketing. People barely live pay check to pay check. It is unthinkable that a family cannot even provide basic needs. So when a wedding or other simcha is coming up what do parents do?

Happy Kallah

Simchas are a community celebration! Join our community and be part of the celebration!

Added Benefits for Contributors:

We help Jewish families who have very limited funds. Additional money that may be available will go toward household necessities.

This campaign will be ongoing. No matter what happens all around us, weddings still happen! Mazal Tov!

The benefits you will come from Above. A great feeling of pride for the community; knowing you performed a praiseworthy mitzvah and receiving great blessings from the bride on her wedding day. The groom, too, will be very grateful! Send us a prayer request with your donation and the bride will say a special brachah for you (anonymously if you wish) and we’ll send you a special thanks after the wedding.

Please Give from your heart

TOV MAOD EVENTS RECEIVES RECOGNITION

the right to display!

I have recently been asked to start writing articles about the wedding industry for “ezine articles“. They have graciously given me “expert author” status and have begun publishing my articles.

I am very honored by this as it is no easy task to get accepted. There are very strict rules and guidelines governing authors. To write on one’s own blog is one thing, getting published is quite another.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me along the way. May you all succeed in your goals and dreams!

Rabbis Rule Joking Teens Legally Married!

Now here’s something to mull over!!

Reuters
Thu Feb 26 18:48:17 UTC 2009 JERUSALEM (Reuters) -

An Israeli girl has become a divorcee at the age of 14. It all began as a lark, in a schoolyard where a 17-year-old boy recently declared the girl his wife, reciting a Jewish ritual vow in front of witnesses, and she accepted his ring.

That, and what a spokeswoman for Israel’s Rabbinical Courts said was the consummation of their marriage, was enough to make them man and wife in the Jewish state.

Spokeswoman Efrat Orbach, describing the girl as the youngest Jewish divorcee in Israel’s modern history, said the couple was granted a rabbinical divorce this week.

Under Israeli criminal law, sexual relations with a 14-year-old girl are not illegal as long as her male partner is no more than three years her senior.

(Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan, Editing by Paul Casciato)

A Wedding Gown – of the People Israel

I found an extraordinarily amazing post on “This is Israel” blog by (A Soldier’s Mother). I had to share this with you.

Nothing in the story that follows took place in Israel and yet everything about it is Israel. We are a country; but we are country made up of a people. Sometimes, the oceans that separate the people cause some to think that we are divided, but in so many ways, we are not. This is the amazing story of a wedding gown…but more, it is the story not just of survival, but of triumph.

It was this same determination that helped build and sustain our country in the early years, and even in the most recent war in Gaza. So, though this is not Israel, this is most definitely Israel. I don’t know who wrote this story originally, but I hope they don’t mind my copying it here to share with everyone…it is truly an amazing story, about an amazing woman, part of an amazing people.

The Wedding Gown That Made History Lilly Friedman doesn’t remember the last name of the woman who designed and sewed the wedding gown she wore when she walked down the aisle over 60 years ago. But the grandmother of seven does recall that when she first told her fiancé Ludwig that she had always dreamed of being married in a white gown he realized he had his work cut out for him.For the tall, lanky 21-year-old who had survived hunger, disease and torture this was a different kind of challenge.

How was he ever going to find such a dress in the Bergen Belsen Displaced Person’s camp where they felt grateful for the clothes on their backs? Fate would intervene in the guise of a former German pilot who walked into the food distribution center where Ludwig worked, eager to make a trade for his worthless parachute. In exchange for two pounds of coffee beans and a couple of packs of cigarettes Lilly would have her wedding gown.

For two weeks Miriam the seamstress worked under the curious eyes of her fellow DPs, carefully fashioning the six parachute panels into a simple, long sleeved gown with a rolled collar and a fitted waist that tied in the back with a bow. When the dress was completed she sewed the leftover material into a matching shirt for the groom.

A white wedding gown may have seemed like a frivolous request in the surreal environment of the camps, but for Lilly the dress symbolized the innocent, normal life she and her family had once led before the world descended into madness.

Lilly and her siblings were raised in a Torah observant home in the small town of Zarica, Czechoslovakia where her father was a melamed, respected and well liked by the young yeshiva students he taught in nearby Irsheva. He and his two sons were marked for extermination immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. For Lilly and her sisters it was only their first stop on their long journey of persecution, which included Plashof, Neustadt, Gross Rosen and finally Bergen Belsen.

Four hundred people marched 15 miles in the snow to the town of Celle on January 27, 1946 to attend Lilly and Ludwig’s wedding. The town synagogue, damaged and desecrated, had been lovingly renovated by the DPs with the meager materials available to them. When a Sefer Torah arrived from England they converted an old kitchen cabinet into a makeshift Aron Kodesh.

“My sisters and I lost everything – our parents, our two brothers, our homes. The most important thing was to build a new home.” Six months later, Lilly’s sister Ilona wore the dress when she married Max Traeger. After that came Cousin Rosie. How many brides wore Lilly’s dress? “I stopped counting after 17.

” With the camps experiencing the highest marriage rate in the world, Lilly’s gown was in great demand. In 1948 when President Harry Truman finally permitted the 100,000 Jews who had been languishing in DP camps since the end of the war to emigrate, the gown accompanied Lilly across the ocean to America. Unable to part with her dress, it lay at the bottom of her bedroom closet for the next 50 years, “not even good enough for a garage sale. I was happy when it found such a good home.”

Home was the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. When Lily’s niece, a volunteer, told museum officials about her aunt’s dress, they immediately recognized its historical significance and displayed the gown in a specially designed showcase, guaranteed to preserve it for 500 years. But Lilly Friedman’s dress had one more journey to make.

Bergen Belsen, the museum, opened its doors on October 28, 2007. The German government invited Lilly and her sisters to be their guests for the grand opening. They initially declined, but finally traveled to Hanover the following year with their children, their grandchildren and extended families to view the extraordinary exhibit created for the wedding dress made from a parachute.

Lilly's special gown 60 years later on display

Lilly’s family, who were all familiar with the stories about the wedding in Celle, were eager to visit the synagogue. They found the building had been completely renovated and modernized. But when they pulled aside the handsome curtain they were astounded to find that the Aron Kodesh, made from a kitchen cabinet, had remained untouched as a testament to the profound faith of the survivors.

As Lilly stood on the bimah once again she beckoned to her granddaughter, Jackie, to stand beside her where she was once a kallah. “It was an emotional trip. We cried a lot.” Two weeks later, the woman who had once stood trembling before the selective eyes of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele returned home and witnessed the marriage of her granddaughter.

The three Lax sisters – Lilly, Ilona and Eva, who together survived Auschwitz, a forced labor camp, a death march and Bergen Belsen – have remained close and today live within walking distance of each other in Brooklyn. As mere teenagers, they managed to outwit and outlive a monstrous killing machine, then went on to marry, have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and were ultimately honored by the country that had earmarked them for extinction.

As young brides, they had stood underneath the chuppah and recited the blessings that their ancestors had been saying for thousands of years. In doing so, they chose to honor the legacy of those who had perished by choosing life.

Great Finds

by Miryam

I’ve been doing a lot of web searching lately for good info to share with you. It’s amazing how many other blogs there are about wedding planning. Most of them are by brides about the experiences they are going through while in the planning stages. You’ll laugh and cry with them!

So how can Tov Maod Events do better for you? Well, for one we’ve added a new affiliate link for you to browse through. We have set up a store via amazon for some amazing resources. Currently in the Market Place is books, magazines, apparrel,  jewelry and a few gift ideas. We will be adding more items and more affiliates as we screen them.

Proceeds from your purchases via Tov Maod, go to our Hachnassat Kallah program. This allows us to provide wedding services for those brides who are truly in need.

So check it out!  “A New Market Place” (you’ll find on the right side bar)You may discover some inspiration!