Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 20 May 1960 — Page 7

Friday, May 20, 1900

The National Jewish POST and OPINION

Are Jewish Weddings Becoming More and More Lavish?

jjy RACHEL A. RABINOWICZ NEW YORK (P-O) — Are Jewish weddings becoming larger, ^ore lavish, more luxurious? "Yes!" declares the banqueting manager of an ultra-elegant hotel of Fifth Avenue, adding inelegantly. “Eat more and more and more until you bust.” “No!” replies the banqueting manager of an equally exclusive hotel at the downtown end of the avenue. “The trend is towards quiet weddings, more restrained, simple and sedate, in very good taste.” Most caterers agree that there is no major movement in either direction. “WHAT DO you mean, large and lavish or small and simple?” demanded one of them unhappily. “It’s not as cut-and-dried as that A wedding can be big without being bountiful, quantity without quality. Or it can be a little but very high class affair. It all depend^.” It depends on the family’s taste, the family’s tradition, the family’s position in the community and (to a lesser degree) the family’s finances. Occasionally the young couple pay for themselves. They book the hall some six or eight months in advance and come in every week with their down-payments on this pay-now-and-marry- later program. OCCASIONALLY the participating parents split the cost. “I had a man come in with his daughter the other day. He wanted all sorts of things. She was calm, collected, would have settled for anything. But no. He had to have this, he had to have that. The best menu, the best everything. Nothing else was good enough. So we worked out the cost and we found that he couldn’t afford it. Next day he came back with the groom’s parents and they agreed to make a substantial contribution. But it was embarrassing for me, so imagine how embarrassing it must have been for them.” But nine times out of ten the time-honored, budget-taxing tradition is observed and it is the bride’s father who pays the caterer and calls the tune. TODAY, as always, the overwhelming majority of Jewish parents have a deep, deep desire to marry off their children with a spectacular splash. After all, practically since the daughter was in diaper's, they’ve waited, worked, worried, schemed, dreamed of just this memorable epoch-making moment. “T h e y want to give the bride and groom a beautiful start in life,” chorus the caterers, misty-eyed, but money-minded, with approval and appreciation. (“All the world loves a wedding, but no one loves it as much as a caterer.) Sometimes they have to keep up with the Cohenses (or the Levys or the Dwight Davidsons.) Sometimes it’s “good for business,” they have to impress partners or clients. But, whatever the inner motivation, middle class parents will “practically kill themselves” in order to put on a good show. They may have to niortgage their home and to bor-

row right and left, but the show goes on. IT TAKES various forms. Some prefer a huge engage ment party, counter-balanced by a small select wedding celebra tion. There is a noticeable rise in “package plan” weddings held in lush, plush nite clubs. Here a charge of from $5 to $12 per person covers dinner, flowers, floorshow, music, waiters, hatcheck, all gratuities. It is a very convenient (“We take care of all the details”) arrangement for parties of from 20 to several hundred, although 100 guests is the usual number. And most nite clubs have their own chapel-on the-premises which can be rented for the ceremony. “A good, fine wedding will not go to a nite club, it’s too public, ’ was the pointed, if prejudiced, comment of the manager of a fashionable East Side hotel. “And if they take a private room in a nite club, they miss the floor show, so what’s the sense? Be sides, it’s false economy. They think they’re getting free entertainment and they don’t realize that they’re paying entertain ment tax which was 20 per cent until very recently.” So what does a good, fine wedding do? A good, fine wedding costs a good, fine fortune. But, there again, it depends on where and when. A caterer on the Lower East Side may charge seven dollars a couple, while on the Upper East Side the rates may run from $25 to $150 dollars a couple. THE Blumengartens make a nice respectable wedding in the Bronx for 100 couples and it costs Mr. Fath©r-of-the-Bride Blu mengarten about $1,800. The Simmermans from Central Park West really go to town. li is a very similar wedding but a mid-town caterer and a midtown hotel tot up a $3,000 bill. Mr. Marvin Marriott-Martin from Marmaroneck marries off

his daughter in a de luxe Manhattan hotel, invites 500 guests and wi'ites off $25,000. (“Listen, the flowers alone cost $5,000. makes the Macy flower show look like a tenement window box!”) But weddings in the $10,000 bracket, although they do occur, are very infrequent. OF COURSE, kashrut adds considerably to the cost of catering. This extra is never less than 25 per cent and sometimes is as much as 100 per cent. So how many people order a kosher wedding? “Our clients don’t go in for that kind of tiling,” maintains the Plaza banqueting manager, some what stuffity. But the Astor and the Park-Sheraton say. that one out of five of the Jewish custom ers specify kosher, while the Sheraton-Atlantic and Claridge put this figure as high as 75 per cent. “They may eat non-kosher on the outside but when it comes to a wedding ... with the old grand parents there . . . they demand kosher . . .out of deference.” Others compromise (with cost or conscience or both) by requiring “kosher-style” which is non-kosher but not blatantly so Usually this means either exclu sively dairy or exclusively meat menus, with ham or seafood sedulously omitted. One caterer explains rather crytically that “we sot out the seafood but we use different bowls.” JEWISH weddings tend ? to be

flowery and it may cost from $100 to $1,000 to adorn the canopy alone. Flowers in general may amount to an.fhing, $40, $400, $4,000 . . . It’s enough to make a father wilt. The orchestration usually strikes a note of happy harmony for rates are union-fixed and un less there is a great deal of over time a several-piece band should not run more than a couple of hundred dollars. So papa can face the music bill with a reasonable degree of equanimity. Oi, veh! What a day! The guests have tottered away. The fledgling’s flown. The nest-egg’s gone. Mother cries at the thought of her darling’s emptied bedroom. Father sighs at the picture of his emptied bank book. Was it worth it . . . the overdraft, the loan from brother-in-law Jake, the aggravation, the argumentation, the heartache, the headache, the hysteria? Hundreds, thousands of dollars, all kaput, vanished like a yesterdaj'’s yesterday. Worth it? Certainly it was worth it! The memory lingers or . . . and on . . . glowing, growing through the years. In decades time they’ll still be saying: “Sure, sure, the Rosenkrantzes (or the Shlivovitzes or the Kassanellenbogens) made a very nice affair but you should have seen what we did for our daughter Now that was a wedding to end all weddings. By our childen’s

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children we should live to see such weddings!” Next Week: The bar mitzva is getting “a big play” but is it more “bar” than “mitzva?”

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