Stability in an Uncertain World: JDC and Jewish Marriage

Judith Kohane remembers their first dance as if it were yesterday. Both survivors from Poland, she and Akiva met while they were working at the JDC supply depot in Schleisheim, Germany, helping to meet the needs of Europe's Jewish remnant after the Holocaust. "Our marriage, like that of so many survivors at the time, began with the Joint," she recalls.

In fact, JDC has had a hand in the making of thousands of Jewish marriages over the course of its 90-year history. Even when it first emerged as an organization, JDC supported marriage and family life by assisting Eastern European Jews as they struggled to pick up the pieces of their lives in the wake of World War I.

The most prominent – though bittersweet – era of JDC marriages began, however, at the end of World War II, when Holocaust survivors faced the painful years of post-war recovery in Europe's DP camps. "JDC, at that time, went about providing what they would have had in a normal Jewish community, from the cradle to the grave," recalled the late Ted Feder (z"l), then JDC deputy zone director for Germany. JDC relief workers responded to their enormous, day-to-day physical needs, while JDC rabbis met the growing demand for Jewish weddings.

JDC's commitment though went even further to include supplying the ritual basics for the ceremonies, manufacturing what it could locally and importing everything else. Parachute silk was fashioned into yarmulkes, putting army surplus to good use. Weddings were so frequent that Ted Feder sent a representative by jeep to Milan to buy up all the gold-plated wedding rings he could find.

Still, it was the JDC chuppah – which represents the new home created by the bride and groom – that proved the most fitting symbol of JDC's reconstruction efforts during that period. Produced in then Palestine, more than 80 were distributed for use in 1948 alone. One of the few remaining examples is on display at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

Nearly fifty years later, JDC once again found itself creating ritual items for Jewish weddings, this time a ketubah for couples marrying after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Likely the first of its kind, the beautifully illuminated Russian-Aramaic manuscript helped fan the sparks of Jewish renaissance across the former Soviet Union. It even made its way to Florida, where civilly- married Russian émigrés were finally able to consecrate their unions in a Jewish ceremony.

Today, JDC continues to participate in the making of Jewish nuptials, offering a sense of stability in these otherwise uncertain times. Especially in remote communities, where small populations mean limited Jewish marriage prospects, and throughout the former Eastern bloc, where reversing an established trend of nearly total intermarriage takes time, Jewish weddings remain the key to Jewish renaissance and communal sustainability.

Through its support of pan-European singles activities like Yachad, an initiative of the European Council of Jewish Communities, and local activities in communities from Casablanca, Morocco to Kaunus, Lithuania, JDC creates diverse opportunities for young Jews to meet. It also develops a social network for students, madrichim, and others through national and regional programming, such as the Lauder/JDC International Summer Camp in Szarvas, Hungary.

In recent years, JDC's efforts have resulted in the first Jewish weddings in more than half a century in towns throughout the vast expanse of former Communist countries. In Cuba, where Jewish life has revived under the Communist regime, JDC makes it possible for Jewish couples already married in civil ceremonies to now wed under a chuppah. And since weddings are just the beginning, JDC initiates programs that enable Jewish parents to raise proud Jewish children who will ensure the continuity of Jewish life.

For thousands of couples, JDC's 90-year legacy of making Jewish marriages has personal meaning. Yet, they all share a larger connection, too, with the full scope of JDC's work to strengthen and sustain world Jewry.

"We had a JDC marriage," says Judith of her life with Akiva, who spent a long and esteemed career with JDC. "And we had a wonderful JDC life."