We love it when a couple makes their Jewish wedding totally, completely them – and that’s exactly what Elana and Seth did. Every single choice they made – from incorporating family and friends at every step of the process to deciding to wed at their family homestead, where Elana’s family has lived for more than thirty years and the couple now make their home – was rooted in their desire to plan a celebration that felt more like, in the couple’s words, a “participatory cultural gathering” than a conventional wedding.
Elana and Seth, along with Elana’s parents and other family and friends, spent months preparing the property for the big day, doing everything from growing flowers to clearing paths and rigging infrastructure. The couple’s intimate Jewish ceremony, which took place on a Friday, featured so many personal touches, from a pre-wedding bathtub mikvah to an elemental procession involving all the guests to Seth’s family chuppah to the couple’s fabulous ketubah from Smashing The Glass Recommended Vendor Once Upon a Paper.
The duo worked with artist Elena to create a bespoke design, and, in Seth’s words, “She welcomed every out there idea we brought to her and created something that felt both ancient and entirely personal. The final result is a true reflection of us.” Don’t miss her incredible work in the images by Kali Taylor and Thais Aquino.
There’s so much more to say about this very special celebration (which included a Wedding Crashers-themed party the Saturday following the chuppah), but we’ll let the couple fill you in on the rest…
How We Met
Seth: We first crossed paths in Lake Tahoe in 2014, when Elana was touring as a performing artist. I remember feeling her energy before we had even properly met or had a deep conversation. We remained loosely connected through overlapping community throughout the years, but it was not until 2022 that we truly sat down together and started to get to know one another.
Elana: I thought it was a business meeting. Seth had other ideas.
Seth: I remember saying jokingly, not jokingly, “I’m Jewish, you’re Jewish… our mothers are going to love each other ;)” Elana rolled her eyes but was intrigued at my boldness.
Elana: At the time, I was amidst a year of celibacy and consciously creating space to call in a life partner. Seth arrived right at the threshold of that year. It gave us space to deepen a genuine friendship while our love organically revealed itself to both of us.
Venue
We were married at our family homestead in Old Westbury, New York, on the six acres where Elana was raised and celebrated her bat mitzvah. The property began as a nineteenth-century farm and has been tended by Elana’s family for more than thirty years.
Elana: Four years before the wedding, I returned to live in the cottage that had belonged to my grandparents. I came home wanting to heal, deepen my relationship with my family, and build a life rooted in land, partnership, and future family. Seth joined me there a year later. It felt deeply meaningful to begin our marriage in the place where so much of my life had already unfolded, and where we are now growing our own home.
Seth: The land was not just the venue. It was alive, and it held the magic for our family and friends to experience. We spent months preparing the property with Elana and her parents (and a variety of friends and family): growing flowers, clearing paths, rigging infrastructure. By the wedding weekend, we had all poured ourselves into the land in both body and spirit, and you could feel it everywhere, from the glamping tents (Long Island Tent & Party Rental) under hundred-year-old trees, to the chuppah placed to align with the setting sun, to the flowers bursting picked from the land that adorned every table.
The design and site planning was done by Jaroff Studio.
Theme
Our wedding unfolded over three days during the summer solstice, from June 19 to 21, 2026. We thought of it less as a conventional wedding and more as an experience of matrimony: a communal threshold belonging not only to us, but to the families, ancestors, land, and community woven into our lives.
Elana: My work as a relational guide and experience designer naturally shaped the emotional and ritual architecture of the weekend. I wanted people to feel that they were entering something, not simply attending something.
Seth: I brought my experience as an entrepreneur and producer. I’ll happily give Elana credit for directing, but we very much collaborated on the vision and much of the creative and production design.
Elana’s parents were also integral collaborators. Her dad, Joe Jaroff, brought architectural design and made sure the land could work as infrastructure, from power to parking to building the chuppah. Her mom, Bhavani, is a chef and world-class gardener who led the design of the cake, collaborated on food, and led all the landscaping.
Our wedding planner, Tory Stolper, is more often a festival producer than a traditional wedding planner, though she has produced a variety of community-led weddings. Among other happenings, she produces CAMP (Calling All Magical People) and was uniquely equipped to help us create a participatory cultural gathering rather than a conventional wedding.
Friday was our intimate Jewish wedding ceremony, with approximately 120 guests. The style was farm chic: earth tones, vintage Moroccan rugs and poufs we collected in Marrakech and Fez, lanterns, low tables, and draped fabrics lent to us by our friends, plus a handmade tea lounge made with the help of our talented, artistic friends.
Saturday expanded into a larger celebration inspired by the pool parties Elana’s family has hosted on the land for more than twenty years.
Elana: We transformed that annual party into the continuation of our wedding. The theme was Wedding Crashers, and everyone came dressed in black and white, from bathing suits and cover-ups to full tuxedos (and Seth and I wore colors – me in a rich regal red robe and Seth in a linen suit hand dyed with marigolds from the land).
Throughout the weekend, Jewish inheritance, land-based ritual, music, prayer, sensuality, playfulness, and creative expression were woven together.
Seth: We hoped people would not simply witness our marriage. We wanted them to experience something about belonging, devotional love, and the kind of culture we want our union to help create in the world.
Invitation/Stationery
Our primary invitation featured a photograph of us taken by Michael Christopher Brown. Our friend Caro Avedano helped refine the graphic design, and we used Canva to create a simple printed invitation.
We initially used WithJoy for our wedding website but found that a standard template could not communicate the nature of the weekend.
Seth: I ended up designing an interactive website (shoutout to the robots at Claude and Lovable) from scratch so we could communicate the rituals, schedule, attire, land, and spirit of the gathering more fully.
Our friend Carson Linforth Bowley also designed the label for the anointing oils we gifted to every guest.
Hair + Makeup
Elana: I wanted to look natural and recognizably myself.
My hair was styled by Tamia (Hair by Tamia), whom I found through Instagram because of her specialization in curly hair. She also styled the hair of my sisters and our mothers.
I had originally planned to do my own makeup. A makeup artist was there for other members of the family, and I ultimately decided to have it professionally done. Looking back, I would have trusted my first instinct and chosen an even lighter, more natural look. My advice to other brides: remember that you know your own face. Choose what makes you feel most like yourself.
Dress
Elana: My dress was from Grace Loves Lace, an Australian bridal company known for elegant, relaxed designs. It was the first place I went and the third dress I tried on. Everyone cried, and we immediately knew.
About a year before the wedding, I began researching designers that used more ethical practices, natural-feeling materials, and simple, timeless silhouettes. Grace Loves Lace was the first and only company I seriously explored. A month later, my sisters asked whether I had started looking for a dress. We checked the company’s sample-sale schedule and discovered that a New York sale was happening the very next day. Everyone changed their plans and came with me.
The dress felt minimal, sculptural, sophisticated, and deeply comfortable. It elevated me while still feeling entirely like me. I did not feel as though I were putting on a bridal costume. I felt like a more fully expressed version of myself.
Accessories
Elana: I was a barefoot bride. My veil was the hat my mother wore for her own wedding over forty years ago. Beyond that, I kept it simple and wore very little jewelry, letting the dress, my natural curls, and the land remain central.
We are, however, huge admirers of our wedding-ring designer, David Rigby-Leigh, who created both the engagement ring and our wedding bands. Using an ancient Roman casting technique, the rings were cast in oak wood, and David works directly with miners in Montana to source the Montana sapphires he uses.
Seth: Sapphire carries particular meaning for us. In Exodus, God is described as being seen upon a pavement of sapphire. It gave the stone a feeling of both earthly material and divine vision.
Bridesmaids
Elana’s bridesmaids represented different chapters of her life: her two sisters, two of her closest childhood friends, and two of her closest friends today.
Elana: Each woman represents an arc of who has known me and walked beside me through different eras of my life.
Rather than choosing a single dress or designer, Elana offered everyone a color palette inspired by the Moroccan textiles and earth tones used throughout the wedding: burgundy, rust, marigold, gold, and deep warm yellows. Each woman chose something that felt like her, creating harmony without requiring uniformity.
Ceremony & Chuppah
Our Jewish ceremony was the culmination of an entire day of preparation and ritual.
Elana: That morning, I entered a mikvah held in a bathtub that had been gifted to me for the wedding. My mother, sisters, and bridesmaids gathered around me. Each woman brought mayim chayim, living waters, from her region of the world and poured them into the bath along with bunches of flowers from our land.
Before I entered the water, the women blessed my body with warm water and mint, offering me a limpia, a cleansing ritual rooted in Mexican indigenous traditions that I am connected to through an Nahual/Aztec lineage called the Moon Dance, which I have been an initiate of for the past five years.
During the mikvah, led by Ganga Devi Braun, I immersed myself seven times for the seven days of creation: seven movements into the waters to revitalize my relationship with Havayah, the name of God as being and becoming, and seven prayers preparing me to receive both the blessings and responsibilities of marriage.
Afterward, I walked barefoot across the land gathering dahlias, yarrow, rosemary, mint, fennel, cilantro, sage, and rue for my bouquet.
Before the ceremony, Elana was held in a Kabbalat Panim, the traditional gathering of women before the bedeken.
Elana: The women sang to me, washed my feet, and offered blessings. I then anointed them and offered blessings in return. In Jewish tradition, I learned that the bride is believed to carry a particular spiritual potency on her wedding day. I wanted that blessing to move outward rather than remain centered only upon me.
While I was at the Kabbalat Panim, Seth gathered with the men for a traditional Tisch led by his close friend and business partner, Gio, a Jerusalemite who is a descendant of the Baal Shem Tov.
Seth: My friend Gio chanted a hasidic prayer before inviting the men to circle me and
offer me blessings. It was powerful to look all the men of my life in the eye as they shared from their hearts. I had intimate moments with both my father and Elana’s father as well as my brother that deeply touched me. Then we processed through a wooded path toward the bedeken singing together. My men and Elana’s women met, and everyone witnessed me lifting her veil before we stepped into the ketubah signing.
After the cocktail party and before the ceremony, all the guests moved silently through an elemental procession:
Fire: Each person offered tobacco into the sacred fire with a prayer for love, for our marriage, their own lives, or the world.
Water: Bridesmaids washed guests’ hands with rose water infused with rose oil we had brought home from Morocco.
Earth: Dried flowers gathered from the land were later tossed over us in celebration.
Air: Our community created the music that carried Elana into the ceremony, walking with her mom and dad, through a collectively harmonized circle song in the vein of Bobby McFerrin, led by our friend Nick Demeris.
Seth: Instead of arriving as spectators, everyone entered and experienced the wedding ceremony as a participant and co-creator. By the time the formal ceremony began, the community was already holding us and fully immersed in the experience.
The chuppah we were married under carried its own family lineage. Seth’s parents designed it and were married beneath it in the early 1980s. Seth’s brother later used it at his wedding, making us the third couple in the family to stand beneath it. It was supported by bamboo poles and placed in the center of a circular ceremony space that Elana’s father designed.
Elana: We did not want to stand on a stage with everyone facing us from one direction. We wanted to be surrounded and held by our community.
Elana and her father carefully oriented the ceremony to the cardinal directions and the setting sun. Behind the chuppah stood a young ginkgo tree we planted before the wedding as a living symbol of the marriage we hope to grow.
Once beneath the chuppah, we circled one another seven times.
Elana: We wanted to honor marriage not as one person orbiting the other, but as the creation of a shared world around and between us.
Once we landed facing one another, our officiant, Seth’s oldest friend, Sarah Waxman, founder of At the Well, officially began the marriage ceremony.
The seven blessings were offered from close friends and family and framed in relationship with the seven lower sefirot, the divine qualities through which love takes form in the world:
Chesed: loving-kindness and generosity.
Gevurah: strength, discernment, and sacred boundary.
Tiferet: beauty, and the harmonizing of love with truth.
Netzach: endurance and devotion.
Hod: humility, gratitude, and reverence.
Yesod: foundation and intimacy.
Malchut: embodied presence, and the world the union is here to serve.
These were not intended to merely seven wishes for a happy marriage. They became seven qualities we were being asked to inhabit and practice.
Then we spoke our vows.
Seth: Our vows were written independently (me the morning of lol), but when we heard them, we realized they were saying the same thing in two different languages. That felt like its own confirmation of the life we were choosing together.
Ketubah
Our ketubah was one of the most meaningful artistic collaborations of the wedding. We worked with Elena of Once Upon a Paper, whose Hebrew calligraphy and hand-drawn artistry immediately felt aligned with what we wanted.
Seth: She welcomed every out there idea we brought to her and created something that felt both ancient and entirely personal. The final result is a true reflection of us.
The ketubah is circular, with red as its central color.
Elana: For us, the red represents blood: the seriousness of the covenant, the devotion binding us together, and the ancestral bloodlines flowing into our new family.
Because we married at the summer solstice, the sun symbolically appears at the highest point of the design, and the waxing crescent moon is positioned according to its actual astronomical relationship with the sun on our wedding day. The ketubah also includes the five Hebrew words of the soul and a passage from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets about “the still point of the turning world,” poetry that has long carried deep meaning in our relationship.
With the guidance of Rabbi Jodi Siff of the Reconstructionist Synagogue of the North Shore, we wrote our own shared commitments to one another. We called them our devotions rather than our obligations. The process involved each of us first writing what we wanted to promise the other. Then we found where our visions overlapped and crafted the final language and nine devotions together.
Our music choice
Music was one of the great gifts of the weekend.
Our dear friend Mel Semé is a member of Gone Gone Beyond and is currently playing Ibrahim Ferrer as a lead in the Broadway production of Buena Vista Social Club. On Friday, he brought together a four-piece ensemble of musicians from the production who took the evening off from Broadway to play at our wedding.
Seth: It was honestly extraordinary. My mind was blown. I grew up listening to the Buena Vista Social Club and to have them play our wedding was beyond a dream come true. We had this incredible Afro-Cuban sound moving through the farm, alongside the most joyful rendition of “Hava Nagila” I’ve ever heard.
Our first dance was to “Marigold” by Gone Gone Beyond, performed live by Mel.
Elana: It was already a song we loved. Having our friend sing it to us live made the moment unforgettable.
Saturday became a twelve-hour musical journey, with friends DJing from the afternoon until sunrise. The lineup included DJ Dreeemy, Oveous, Gio Israel, Elana herself, and several other artists from our community. One of our favorite performers was our friends’ six-year-old daughter, DJ Binks, who proudly says that her beats are “thick.”
We also had handpan, tabla, and acoustic performances throughout the weekend, including music from Ehren Hanson, Noah Katz Appel, Megan Kinney, and others.
Flowers
There was no florist. Nearly every flower and herb used in the wedding came directly from the land, and our family and friends gathered and arranged them together.
Elana: The previous year, without yet knowing exactly when we would marry, I planted dahlias. Because dahlias are normally at their fullest later in the summer, we lifted the tubers before winter, started them early in a greenhouse, and replanted them in May so they would bloom for our June wedding.
After my mikvah, I walked the property and gathered my own bouquet: dahlias, yarrow, cilantro, fennel, mint, rosemary, sage, and rue.
The day before the wedding, Elana and her bridesmaids gathered flowers and herbs for the tables. Mugwort, catnip, lavender, rosemary, mint, marigolds, and dahlias became loose, fragrant centerpieces. We had also dried flowers from the land the previous summer, which were placed into small paper packets and given to guests to toss at the conclusion of the ceremony.
Photographer and videographer
We were incredibly fortunate to have our wedding documented by artists who already knew and loved us.
Our primary photographers were Kali Taylor and Thais Aquino. Our friend Michael Christopher Brown, an extraordinary documentary photographer, was also present as a guest and captured many intimate moments throughout the weekend. Our cousin Dustin Wolfe created our wedding film.
Elana: We chose people from within our creative community because we wanted the images to carry familiarity and trust (three top photographers was not in the budget).
Seth: They were not entering as outsiders trying to understand us quickly. They already knew our relationship, our families, and the world we were creating. That intimacy is visible in what they captured.
Food and cake
Our Friday dinner was catered by Chef Vero Cabeza of Yes Babe NYC, who created a seasonal, farm-to-table meal using local ingredients, served family-style to reflect the communal spirit of the evening.
We also wanted Elana’s mother, Bhavani Jaroff, an accomplished chef, to be able to remain present rather than cater her daughter’s wedding.
Elana: My mother has cooked for so many people throughout her life. It mattered to me that she could be the mother of the bride and actually experience the weekend.
She contributed in loving but contained ways: charcuterie boards, quiches for Sunday brunch, and our extraordinary wedding cake, an eleven-layer lemon and vanilla cake with strawberry filling and an airy whipped cream frosting, covered in abundant fresh fruit.
Seth: It was wildly beautiful, but it also felt personal because her mother had made it.
Wedding List/Registry
We used WithJoy for our wedding registry.
Seth: It was fine.
Elana: That may be the least poetic answer in this entire interview, but it is the truth!
Extra Details
A sacred fire was lit on Friday afternoon before the formal wedding began.
Elana: I sparked it myself with a ferro rod while wearing my wedding dress.
Our friend Lance, a Lakota elder from Pine Ridge, tended the fire throughout the weekend until midnight on Sunday. We hold deep respect for the distinct lineages that have shaped our lives, and it was important that every tradition be held with relationship, permission, and care.
Seth: The fire did not replace or merge itself into the Jewish ceremony. It became a living hearth around which the many prayers of the weekend could gather.
We also created an ancestor altar at the entrance to the reception tent, filled with photographs of our grandparents, great-grandparents, and those whose lives made ours possible.
As a gift, we made each guest roll-on anointing oil using rose from Morocco and frankincense from Egypt.
Elana: Frankincense has been used in temples for millennia, while rose carries the feminine, the sensual, and the living earth. Bringing them together became another small expression of matrimony.
Saturday’s Wedding Crashers themed celebration was a continuation of the magic.
Seth: Friday was about marrying one another and bringing our families together. Saturday held a second ceremony officiated by our best friend, Liana Sananda.
Elana: We thought of Saturday as marrying our communities. During that ceremony, we braided three ribbons together, symbolizing three rivers: our families, our own union, and our wider communities. Those three rivers became one braid, representing the life we are now weaving together.
Sunday coincided with both the solstice weekend and Father’s Day. We closed with a brunch and a ritual honoring fathers, future fathers, and the healing of our collective relationship with the masculine.
The entire weekend was created through community. Friends made music, designed spaces, held rituals, arranged flowers, cooked, photographed, tended the fire, and offered speeches. Our parents spoke about the values of the two families coming together.
We wanted the wedding to express the kind of marriage we are entering: a union grounded enough to let each person become more free. We see marriage as roots from which to fly. Strong enough to make space for the uncontainable mystery of family, creativity, community, and whatever life asks us to become.
Honeymoon
We have not yet taken our full honeymoon, but we spent a beautiful minimoon in Big Sky, Montana, where a friend generously offered us her home. The mountains, quiet, rain, and even a little summer snow gave us a place to rest and integrate after such an expansive weekend.
For our longer honeymoon, we are considering either Kenya or Japan.
Elana: Kenya would offer wildness: safari, wildlife, camping, and dinners beneath the stars.
Seth: Japan would offer a different kind of awe through its cultural attention, craftsmanship, nature, simplicity, and order.
Those two possibilities reflect something central in our relationship: the meeting of wildness and form, chaos and order, freedom and devotion.
Advice to couples currently planning their wedding
A wedding is a threshold on many levels at once. You are navigating your own transformation, the evolution of your relationship, the merging of families, inherited patterns, financial decisions, creative differences, and the needs of an entire community.
Elana: The question I would keep returning to is: What is this wedding actually in service to?
Rather than making our wedding elaborate, we aspired to make it deep. We wanted every ritual and creative decision to carry meaning and intention rather than repeating traditions simply because they were expected.
If you want to create something different than a standard wedding, we consider Stephen Jenkinson’s book Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart’s Work essential reading. It shaped how we came to understand matrimony not as a private event but as a communal rite, and it gave language to so much of what we were reaching for throughout the weekend.
In the weeks before the wedding, Elana wrote a farewell letter to her unmarried self and a welcome letter to the woman entering matrimony.
Elana: I drew an image of the maiden I was releasing and burned it in the fire. Then I created an image of the woman and future mother I was inviting forward. That private ritual helped me emotionally arrive before the public ceremony began.
Create moments that allow you to feel what you are crossing into. Make space for silence, reflection, sadness, gratitude, and joy. Sometimes the heart needs to feel what is ending before it can fully receive what is beginning.
Seth: Ask for help. Practice receiving. Let people hold you. You cannot and should not carry an experience like this alone.
Elana: Create enough quiet around yourself that you can move out of the logistical mind and into your heart. Let yourself receive.
Most importantly, allow the wedding to become a genuine expression of your relationship. Even when family members disagree or have different expectations, stay close to the deeper truth you and your partner are trying to bring to life. That expression is ultimately the gift you offer everyone who gathers with you.
ELANA & SETH’S LITTLE WHITE BOOK
Photography – Kali Taylor and Thais Aquino
Videography – Dustin Wolfe
Ketubah – Once Upon a Paper {offers 10% discount to all members of Smashing The Glass’s Brides Club}
Planner – Tory Stolper of CAMP
Bride’s dress – Grace Loves Lace
Rings – David Rigby-Leigh
Hair – Hair by Tamia
DJ – Mel Semé of Gone Gone Beyond, DJ Dreeemy, Oveous, Gio Israel, Ehren Hanson
Catering – Yes Babe NYC and Bhavani Jaroff
Cake – Bhavani Jaroff
Invitation photography – Michael Christopher Brown
Officiant – Sarah Waxman of At the Well
Rabbi – Rabbi Jodi Siff of the Reconstructionist Synagogue of the North Shore
Design & site planning – Jaroff Studio
Tents – Long Island Tent & Party Rental
Gifts label design – Carson Linforth Bowley
Registry – WithJoy
If you’re a Jewish or Jew-ish bride-to-be, you’ll want to join Smashing The Glass’ Brides Club. Guided by the world’s number 1 Jewish wedding expert, Karen Cinnamon, Brides Club is the private community for Jewish and Jew-ish brides that removes wedstress and indecision and gives you what you need to plan with confidence during these uncertain times. Join our Brides Club here.
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