All weddings celebrate new bonds and expanded families. Jewish weddings tie the participants to their distinct heritage and connection with the greater Jewish community. The wedding ceremony is traditionally conducted in Hebrew, the language used for religious purposes by most Jews around the world.
At the close of the wedding ceremony, a Jewish groom traditionally crushes a glass under his foot. This ritual is usually explained as a symbol of sadness about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and asks those in attendance to think of the past even as they celebrate the future.
Engagement contracts (tna'im) between the families of the future bride and groom established the financial obligations of the families to one another.
For much of the past, marriages for Jews and non-Jews alike represented a merging of two families’ financial interests, as well as a partnership between spouses.
This knife was used by Rabbi Moses R. Friedman during his career as a mohel, or ritual circumciser. In 1923 Rabbi Friedman performed his first circumcision on his son, Joseph.
Berthold Katz used this book to help prepare boys for their bar mitzvah ceremonies. He was a rabbi, cantor, teacher, and shochet (ritual slaughterer).
According to Jewish law, a boy becomes a bar mitzvah after he reaches his thirteenth birthday. The bar mitzvah celebration acknowledges a boy’s public entrance into adulthood, his membership in the Jewish religious community, and his responsibility to observe mitzvot (Jewish religious obligations). In recent years, many Jewish communities have begun celebrating a girl’s passage into adulthood with a bat mitzvah celebration.
These tefillin were worn by Jacob Shama who was born in 1893 in Aleppo, Syria. Tefillin are two cube-shaped black leather boxes attached to long black leather straps. Inside the boxes are four passages from the Torah that are handwritten on parchment. This particular set is small and possibly designed for travel.
This bat mitzvah invitation was made for six adult women in New York. The adult bar or bat mitzvah allows Jews who did not have an opportunity to publicly celebrate their coming of age as a teenager to do so as an adult. In particular, many women who did not receive Jewish education as a child or to whom a bat mitzvah celebration was not available, choose to do so as adults.
Over the course of the 20th century, women have played an increasingly active role in almost all branches of Judaism. The bat mitzvah ceremony for girls, pioneered in America in 1922 by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, is now nearly as common as the bar mitzvah ceremony for boys.