Tag #122674 - Interview #101182 (Simon Glasberg)

We were married in 1964, I was 25. We skipped the engagement period. We were good friends, determined to get married. My parents-in-law were aware of it, [that we will have the wedding ceremony at the synagogue], and, oddly enough, they also consented. Naturally, as my mother-in-law was Jewish by birth, she shouldn’t have had reasons to be against the marriage. But my father-in-law, a gendarme without higher education, as they only graduated some sort of military high school – he attended high school in far-away Oradea, he used to call it Oradea Mare, those were his words, for he graduated the gendarmes high school at Oradea Mare –, and he wasn’t against it, there were no discussions. But we didn’t have the religious ceremony in Botosani, for we didn’t know many people there [from the Jewish Community in Botosani]. And I asked my older brother – he was a university lecturer in Iasi – to inquire if we could perform it in Iasi. And they [the rabbi] agreed to perform it in Iasi, but we had to pay a fee, for her religion was considered to be Orthodox, and she had to enter the Jewish religion. And then my brother said: ‘Bear in mind, my brother is a student, and he doesn’t really have money.’ For I didn’t – I was recently hired, my salary was small, incredibly small. And we went there, but I had to pretend to be a student – such were the times. They charged me something symbolic, I only paid a symbolic fee. [Her entering the Mosaic religion] was like a sort of baptism, there was a mikveh there, I know that there was a bathtub there, and I don’t know how it was performed – my wife told me the details back then, but countless years have passed since then. There was a rabbi in Iasi, but it wasn’t the rabbi who performed the wedding ceremony, but an assistant, who was also a sort of rabbi. It was performed in a synagogue. A kippah was used as well, so it was performed with everything required for a marriage ceremony.