INTERFAITH COUPLES
Find Meaning in the Ketubah
GEORGE ALTSHULER | JE FEATURE
At their 2014 wedding, Jessica and Drew Gins-
berg served focaccia as an homage to where
they met — a California Pizza Kitchen in
Bethesda, Md. Jessica and Drew, now 30 and 28,
said they wanted the details of their wedding to
have significance.

e Ginsbergs focused a good amount of thought
on one item in particular — their ketubah, or mar-
riage contract. Like many interfaith couples, they
chose to customize this ancient document and give
it personal meaning.

“We wanted to design our ketubah so that it
was a reflection of us and our relationship,” said
Drew Ginsberg.

e Ginsbergs’ ketubah includes the line “our home
will be built on the foundation of our faith and values”
and is surrounded by a colorful watercolor design.

Rabbi Sarah Tasman, the director of Interfaith-
Family in Washington, D.C., said she sees the desire
to personalize ketubot as part of a larger trend of
couples customizing their weddings. Increasingly,
couples are choosing nontraditional kiddush cups
and modifying the customary seven blessings recited
during the ceremony, she said.

30 OCTOBER 27, 2016
Top: Kirsten and Jonathan Sidell
pause after signing their ketubah
in October 2015.

Photo provided
Above: Other couples opt for
reproductions of historic ketubot,
like this one from 1614 from
Venice, Italy.

Courtesy of Ketubah.com, an authorized
reproduction from the permanent
collection the Jewish Museum of
New York
SIMCHAS “e biggest trend I see in the weddings I do is that
people want the Jewish tradition to feel personalized,”
said Tasman.

Traditionally, the ketubah is a prenuptial agreement
that establishes a husband’s obligations to his wife and
protects her in the case of divorce or the death of her
husband. Today, while some couples stick to the tradi-
tional Aramaic text and Jewish designs, others choose
to modernize their ketubah with new versions of the
text and artwork that doesn’t contain Jewish imagery.

With interfaith marriages becoming more common
— a 2015 Pew Research Center study showed that 39
percent of Americans who married since 2010 had a
spouse who belonged to a different religion than they
do — people are seeing the ketubah as a means of con-
secrating their marriage, even if they aren’t Jewish.

An article in e New York Times stated that “such
sentiments have been reshaping the market for ketubot
in the past decade.”
Tasman believes that deviating from the conven-
tional Aramaic text reflects “a more ancient tradition
of variation among ketubah texts.” e earliest extant
ketubah is from around 440 BCE and was found in
Egypt, according to ketubah.com.

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