Weddings
Continued from Page 21
mother-in-law asked Boroff is she could set Berkowitz up with one
of her three sons.

They ended up setting her up with her son, Arthur.

“In those days, we all did a lot of blind dating,” Berkowitz
said. “He didn’t call for six months, and we went on our first date
in January.”
The two grew up in the Har Zion Temple community, though
they didn’t know each other. The whole synagogue knew about
their relationship while they were dating and, when Boroff and
Berkowitz’s mother-in-law passed each other in the community,
they would just shrug their shoulders. The two were dating, but
there was no commitment.

After about two years, Berkowitz told Arthur that she didn’t
want to just keep dating. She wanted to get married or break up.

He told her he would make a decision in January, on the anniver-
sary of when they first started going out.

The day of their anniversary, Berkowitz, who worked as a
teacher, received a dozen red roses at school. The flowers came
with a note that had a simple message: Lisa, yes, Arthur.

Later that day, he bought her a skirt, as she wanted to pick out
her own ring.

They got married that October at Har Zion.

Their wedding was the largest of the three, with about 350 in
attendance. The assemblage was so large they had to get creative
with the bar, going with one that had a circular shape, so that a lot
of people could get to it at one time. Rabbi Gerald I. Wolpe, Har
Zion’s popular rabbi at the time, officiated.

“I do remember what this child of mine said after the wedding,”
Boroff said. “She said, ‘It’s perfect. It’s exactly what I wanted.”’
“I wanted to get married,” Berkowitz added. “So I was just hap-
py to have a party. I was just happy to be getting married.”
In what might be a family tradition, Berkowitz also played a
role in her daughter’s matchmaking as well, but with a 21st cen-
tury twist. While Fridberg was a graduate student in St. Louis,
Berkowitz encouraged her to try JDate.

That’s how Fridberg met her husband Jonathan. He was only the
second person she met through the dating site. After graduation,
the two moved to Chicago, then to the Philadelphia area a year ago.

Fridberg knew he was going to propose — they had gone ring shop-
ping together — but she didn’t know when. After about two years of
dating and during a weekend away together, he popped the question.

They were engaged for about a year and a half. Though they were
living in Chicago then, they wanted to get married in Philadelphia,
closer to where both of their families lived. Berkowitz ended up
doing much of the planning with the help of a wedding planner.

She hadn’t used a planner for her own wedding, but was glad to
have the help for planning her daughter’s.

They chose the Phoenixville Foundry as their venue, and a
Reconstructionist rabbi officiated.

“We knew we didn’t want to get married in a synagogue,”
Fridberg said. “We wanted to get married in the place where the
party would be kind of rustic-themed.”
Fridberg and her husband wanted the wedding to feel like it
was just the two of them there. They also wanted the wedding to
just be fun, with lots of dancing.

“A wedding is a happy occasion, a joyous occasion,” Fridberg
said. “We don’t want to stress about little things.” ❤
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