Tag #120838 - Interview #87387 (Rifca Segal)

The religious ceremony wasn’t performed at the synagogue. They brought the canopy to my parents’ house, for I was a member of the party and so was my husband, and they would have expelled us from the party, had they known we had a religious ceremony performed. It wouldn’t have been such a disaster if they expelled us from the party, but they would have automatically kicked out my husband from the educational system. It was terrible. The ceremony was attended by my parents, our wedding sponsors – Itic, my husband’s brother and his wife –, one of the grandmothers who were still alive, the one from my mother’s side of the family, the other one, poor soul, was no longer alive, and by 2 girl friends who were close to me – one of them was Minuta and the other was Trudi, one of them died and the other is living in Israel – with their husbands. That was it. There was no one else present. We were afraid to invite anyone else – for fear they could inform on us. You couldn’t trust anybody. And we covered the windows, I remember it as if it were yesterday, so that you couldn’t see inside the house. It was as if we committed a crime back then. God forbid! But the wedding was performed by the book, no detail was left out. With a canopy, you walk around it three times – the groom, the bride, the wedding sponsors and the parents, all in a file. They walk around the altar [the bimah] in the synagogue. I didn’t have this opportunity, I walked around the rabbi. The name of the rabbi who performed our religious ceremony was Smucler. And then the groom and the bride stand next to each other and the rabbi offers the groom a drink, and then the groom gives the bride a drink from that blessed wine, then the glass is placed in a handkerchief, and the groom must step on it and brake it. And they say that if he manages to break the glass properly, it is he who will be the rooster in the home. I told my husband: “Don’t break it properly, for I want it to be me who rules, not you.” He broke it, but he wasn’t the rooster in our home. No, he was gentle, kind… And we organized a meal after the wedding ceremony. It wasn’t like in a restaurant, it was a regular meal. It was during winter, in November, we had no eggplants, no tomatoes, we had soup, meat, they managed to bake a cream cake, and it was very modest. People had no money back then, where could one get the money from…