I enjoyed reading the personal stories of multi-cultural weddings in the Light’s Oy! Magazine (included in subscribers’ Feb. 23 edition). My husband and I also had a multi-cultural wedding, as he is Yemenite (like Galia Movitz) and I am Ashkenazi American (like Milton). However, our union was not the fairy tale event enjoyed by the Movitzes. Rather, it more closely resembled the 2002 movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”

It started with the guest list. “I want a small wedding,” I told Elie, my husband-to-be. He agreed, saying, “Just my family.” “How many people in your family?” I asked. “Oh,” he replied, “about 250.”

Then came the invitations. Among Yemenite Israeli Jews, proper etiquette requires that you hand-deliver the invitations to all of your guests. This is quite a feat if you have 250 people in your family, and especially if they live in various parts of the country. Elie’s parents decided to take it upon themselves to order the invitations, so that they could get started with the distribution as soon as possible. After the invitations were already ordered and printed, they showed them to me. I was shocked to see that my last name – which was “Lev” -appeared on the invitations as “Levy.” When I protested that my name was not “Levy,” they were unfazed. Their reply: “No one knows who you are anyway.”

Three days before the wedding, we held a traditional Yemenite henna ceremony, complete with me wearing the traditional Yemenite headdress. (It takes more than two hours for the decorations on the headdress to be wrapped around the bride’s head, and the bride has to sit perfectly still during that time.) When I appeared in front of the guests, all of the women in Elie’s family began ululating. My grandmother (who was born to extremely refined German Jewish-Americans in Philadelphia in 1911) said it reminded her of Native Americans at a pow-wow.

Like all Jewish brides in Israel, I was required to visit the mikvah prior to the wedding ceremony. In America, going to the mikvah is a private affair. Not so in Yemenite Jewish tradition. All of my in-laws’ female friends and family accompanied me to the mikvah, and afterwards, we walked back through the neighborhood, singing and chanting and clapping and ululating, until everyone in the neighborhood knew that a bride had just visited the mikvah.

Finally the wedding arrived, and by Yemenite standards, it was a modest affair, only 350 people. A more typical wedding occurred in the family two weeks after we tied the knot, when Elie’s cousin (one of nine) married a Yemenite woman (one of 12) who was from moshav. Their wedding had 900 guests.

After almost 18 years, however, I have to admit that I wouldn’t change a single thing about my Big Fat Yemenite Wedding.

Dor to Dor

Galit Lev-Harir is a frequent contributor to the Jewish Light. Galit lived in Israel for nine years. She is Vice President for a large health insurance company. Her husband, Elie Harir, is the owner of The Mediterranean Grill, an Israeli-style restaurant in Chesterfield Valley.

“Dor to Dor,” is an intermittent Jewish Light series looking at various aspects of “grown-up” life and generational connections through the lens of Jewish writers living in the St. Louis area. If you are interested in contributing to Dor to Dor, please email efutterman@thejewishlight.com.