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Best Jewish Wedding Moments – Smashing The Glass Picks of 2014

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Best-Jewish-Wedding
It’s my hope that every day is an inspiring one on Smashing The Glass, but today I’m  revealing my 20  ‘best of the best’  Jewish wedding details of 2014, so it  might just be the most inspiring day of the year on the blog yet! I’m talking the most original chuppah design, the best smashing-the-glass moment, the best wedding slogan, the best twist on the traditional hotel wedding, the most unusual Jewish wedding venue… you get the picture.. a huge array  of the very best Jewish wedding details all wrapped up in one fabulous post!

From  tomorrow I’ll be taking a short break to spend some quality time with my family  over  the holidays, and  during that time  I’ll be posting  some of my favourite real Jewish weddings from the archives. But today it’s all about the ‘best bits’ from Smashing The Glass’s 60 real Jewish weddings  that were featured  in  2014. That’s 60  à¼ber cool, unique, inspirational Jewish (and Jew-ish!) weddings that were showcased over  the last 12 months that inspired thousands of you across the globe!

I would like to extend an  enormous  thank you to my wonderful readers and sponsors for all your support during 2014  — It brought me such joy to share the most creative  Jewish weddings and ideas with you, and I can’t wait to bring you even more inspiration (and a whole host of exciting projects including the brand new Smashing The Glass shop) in the New Year.

Wishing you and yours a very happy holiday. I’ll see you (hangover or no hangover)  on the morning of January 1st  2015! Meanwhile enjoy the best of the best…

Best ‘smashing the glass’ moment

breaking the glass
Chosen  from  Natalie & Nicole’s Jewish wedding  photographed by Lara Hotz  —  Two ridiculously gorgeous  brides breaking their glasses in unison in the most beautiful of Jewish weddings, bursting with creativity.

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How to make your friends and family feel extra special at your wedding

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creative wedding ideas

Smashing The Glass is all about super creative Jewish (and Jew-ish) weddings packed with individuality and personal details so you’ve definitely come to the  right place for inspiration!

I’ve come up with lots of creative ideas for you with everything from innovative ways  to include  friends, family and little ones in your ceremony to making them feel ultra special at your reception

Ceremony ideas

A lovely way to get your closest friends and family involved is to have them contribute to your chuppah design. Ask guests  to contribute different squares (tell them what size is required or  supply a blank piece of square material sized correctly) and patchwork them together to make one big chuppah canopy.

Cheryl and Ernest’s  beautiful personalised chuppah quilt (below) is an example that’s made out of the clothes of the bride’s mother who sadly passed away, and other momentous pieces including her grandmother’s wedding dress and a shirt her mum had kept of her grandfather’s after he had died, but the same quilt style could be used by asking friends and family to each  contribute  a square, and sewing them altogether.

quilted-chuppah
Image: Daniel C. Photography from Cheryl & Ernest’s Jewish wedding

Or do what my husband and I did  where we  asked some of our guests to contribute to our chuppah design by asking them to compose a short message (in English or Hebrew) that we then incorporated into our chuppah canopy design.

This was also a lovely way of including guests from abroad that weren’t able to attend in person. We also chose four significant people to hold each of the four chuppah poles including Sharon, our Irish Catholic mutual friend that set us up (chuppah holders don’t have to be Jewish). Perhaps your fiancà©e’s best friend could do that? Everyone we asked felt very honoured!

personal chuppah
Image: Earthy Photography  from my own  Jewish wedding

Another ‘ceremony’ idea is to replace the traditional  Sheva Brachot (seven blessings) with prayers  by  all your friends personalised for you, then have each friend came up and read their own prayer. Chelm and Jake did that in their Jewish wedding — have a read of their wedding post for  many more ideas of how to involve friends and family. And even if you don’t want to personalise the seven blessings, you can still ask  seven different friends or cousins to read each blessing for you at the chuppah.  People comfortable reading Hebrew can  read the blessing in Hebrew, while non-Jewish friends can always  read an English translation.

Wedding reception  ideas

A lovely  way to make your guests feel super special is to incorporate another detail that I did for my wedding. My husband and I  knew we wouldn’t have a lot of time to talk to everyone on the day, so we spent some time before the wedding writing personal notes to everyone at the wedding which we then had printed underneath their names on their menus / name cards. It took a bit of time but we really wanted each and every guest to realise how much we wanted them there and what they meant to us.

personal wedding messages
Images: Earthy Photography  from my own  Jewish wedding

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What’s the correct processional order for a Jewish wedding ceremony?

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Jewish wedding question
To begin with, I want to say that “there is no such thing as a ‘generic’ Jewish wedding — no matter what the rabbi tells you, no matter what your mother tells you, and no matter what the caterer tells you”.

That’s not my quote, that’s Anita Diamant’s, from her wonderful book, The New Jewish Wedding. And I start with it, as it’s important to know that just like all other aspects of a Jewish wedding, the processional order will vary with how religious you are, and your local practices, but it will still follow this basic order:

The wedding party enters in this order:

  • Rabbi and/or chazan (cantor) on Rabbi’s right.
  • Bride’s grandparents (or they can choose to be seated beforehand)
  • Groom’s grandparents (or they can choose to be seated beforehand)
  • Ushers in pairs (shortest to tallest)
  • Best man and / or Best woman
  • The groom, escorted by his parents (father on his left, mother on his right)
  • Bridesmaids (individually or in pairs)
  • The bride, escorted by her parents (father on her left, mother on her right)

Jewish-wedding-ceremony-processional-order

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Smashing The Glass features in this week’s Jewish Chronicle

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jewish-chronicle-smashing-the-glass
I’m in the diary section of the Jewish Chronicle today – such a sweet piece! Thank you to the lovely folk at The JC for writing about me.

If you’ve found Smashing The Glass via this article well hello there! You can read all about why I started the blog here, and see my own Jewish wedding (at London’s Wallace Collection)  here. In fact, the  heart and soul of SmashingTheGlass.com are the real Jewish weddings  so I think that’s a great place to start.

Click here and you’ll find  all the UK Jewish weddings that I’ve blogged about  with everything from this  outrageously cool London Jewish wedding, to this breathtaking ‘HinJew’ wedding at the Mandarin Oriental where the bride and groom intertwined their Indian and Jewish heritages incredibly beautifully, to this New Years Eve fancy dress wedding held in an Arthouse cinema, to this South London Jewish wedding that was held in a chapel(!),and this Wedstock-themed wedding featuring a bride who made her entire dress out of paper. You can bet your bottom dollar that I’ve blogged about every Jewish wedding  in between too.

cool-jewish-wedding
Chelm & Jake’s super cool London Jewish wedding by Blake Ezra Photography

I also regularly post wedding planning articles  and have  blogged  about everything from what are the best chuppah entrance songs, to tips for getting great wedding photography to how to incorporate ‘Jewish’ into a non-Jewish or interfaith wedding, inspiration for chuppah ideas, and lots more.

And if you’re still on the hunt for that perfect photographer, DJ, chazan, or venue, my  Smashing Suppliers section is a great place to start.  It’s my handpicked selection of the most stylish brands and services the wedding industry has to offer, and you’ll not only be able to click through to the suppliers own websites to see what they say about themselves, you’ll be able to see a lot of their work first hand in the real Jewish weddings section and read the opinion of couples that have actually used them.

I love helping my readers plan their weddings but the best part is when couples email me their own photographs after their wedding and tell me that Smashing The Glass helped them have the wedding they truly wanted!

By the way if you’re reading this and you’re already  married, be sure to send me a submission. It’s my readers who ultimately make my blog a must-read and I can’t wait to hear from you!

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Rachel & Zach | Intimate City Chic Jewish Winter Wedding at Old Finsbury Town Hall, Islington, London

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LONDON JEWISH WEDDING
Rachel and Zach were married at Old Finsbury Town Hall, which has to be one of the most beautiful wedding venues in London. They threw a really relaxed, fun wedding party and organised most of it via the wonders of the internet from their home in New York.

They ditched a lot of the traditional wedding formalities too: they chose not to have a bridal party, wedding cake, expensive dress or favours, and had some brilliant ideas, like using Rachel’s enormous collection of New Yorker magazines as individual place cards for each guest. They also devised a very traditional, but totally egalitarian, Jewish ceremony with tons of personal twists, and an utterly unique ketubah. They also wrote an inspired wedding program. The beautiful bride, Rachel, elaborates below.

Chris Giles, their photographer, does city chic romance effortlessly, and even the way he captures Rachel’s shoes perched on a side table is like something out of a modern fairytale. Enjoy every one of Chris (and his wife, Laura)’s gorgeous images, and whisk yourself away to a warm-hearted wintery December in London.

Finsbury Town Hall London Jewish Wedding_0012

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