Letter from Israel
Planning a Wedding in Israel
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Planning a simple beach wedding in Israel is no simple task. Photo: Meredith M. Price
"So you want a white dress?" said the suspicious elderly sales lady. "For your chatoona?" she continued, unwilling to relent even after my obvious attempts to hem and haw.
I was standing in a short, strapless, white satin dress that flared at the waist into a multilayered, puffy skirt. It was more appropriate for Alice than a bride, and I felt like I had eaten too many mushrooms in Wonderland.
"This one is beautiful on you," she said, slowly sizing up my scrawny, white legs and small bust. By the look in her squinting eyes and the way she pursed her painted red lips, I knew she had more to say. "It's great because it highlights your flat stomach and covers up your fat behind," she said matter-of-factly.
I was speechless. It was Day 10 of my frenzied wedding dress hunt, and I was getting desperate. I had browsed through every store on Dizengoff Street — even the ones that rent the gaudiest, most bejeweled and ostentatious wedding dresses you can imagine for thousands of dollars. After exhausting the cookie-cutter, all-things-lace-sequin-and-pearl wedding dress shops, I turned to small boutiques. I thought it might be possible to find a white dress that would suit a bride with a modest budget who likes simplicity, not frills. Needless to say, I left that particular store thinking more about my rear end than a wedding dress. Only in Israel, I muttered to myself in disgust.
I had no idea that I would be subjecting myself to such trials and tribulations. I thought finding a location for a beach wedding in Israel would be easy. And how different could it be from the United States, right?
The first major difference is, of course, the language, and I learned the hard way to let my Israeli fiancé handle any and all financial negotiations after one photographer, picking up on my accent immediately, quoted an astronomical sum in dollars over the phone.
After all, in the mind of every Israeli, American citizenship equals exorbitant wealth. The second problem is the fact that even for Israelis, anything related to a wedding, including makeup artists, the designer, the caterer and the location itself, instantly trebles in price. As an experiment, I had an Israeli friend call a makeup artist to get a quote for a party — 250 NIS (about $50).
For a wedding, the same person charges 1,500 NIS (close to $400). It's laughable but true. And for most couples getting married, it's hard not to get swept up in the psychological rhetoric you hear over and over again: "You only get married once." Or my personal favorite, "You never deserve to spoil yourself more than when you're a bride."
Anxious to find help with the preparations, I turned to wedding planners. Enter Loko. The name alone should have tipped us off, but he came highly recommended. We arranged a meeting and told him what we wanted and how much we wanted to spend. We left the meeting reassured that our wedding would be in good hands. But after three weeks of leaving messages for him, each one more frantic than the last, we finally had to face the fact that Loko was as unreliable as his nickname suggests.
I reluctantly accepted the fact: If I wanted my wedding to be done right, I would have to do it myself. My fiancé handled the price negotiations in meetings I set up with an army of professionals, and by January we had booked our dream location right on the beach. It took another few months to hire a photographer.
The only thing left then was the designer, the invitations and the dress. I remember thinking to myself that the rest would be easy, and I was rather proud of how much I had managed to accomplish despite not being a native speaker. As usual, I underestimated the number of details required in order to host 200 people for a few hours on the beach. I didn't consider that the foreign alcohol would be best purchased in duty-free if we wanted to save ourselves a huge amount of money, which meant enlisting the help of traveling friends. I had no idea that designing unique wedding invitations could take so many hours and require so much thought. And planning a seating chart is far more than just who sits next to whom. It's a veritable test of one's knowledge of human psychology.
Luckily, my mom came for a visit from Atlanta in late April. Just when I was on the verge of breaking down at the thought of spending more than $1,000 on a dress I didn't really love, she saved the day. Shocked by the prices here in Israel, she suggested browsing through vintage stores. "Why not?" I told her. "I've been everywhere else." But after sifting through piles of decaying yellow dresses in Nachalat Binyamin that the shop owner assured me were brand new and cost a mere $500, I wasn't hopeful.
At long last, after every other option had been exhausted, Mom and I decided to glance in a secondhand store on Sheinkin Street. A few white and ivory dresses were hanging from a rack just below the ceiling. The first one was way too big and frumpy. The second was too tight. But the third one I put on felt right as soon as I got it zipped. A simple, long satin dress with a delicate lace overlay, it fit me almost perfectly.
"This is the one," I said to mom, chuckling at the 600 NIS price tag since my fiancé had just spent 2,400 NIS on his attire. The moral of the story? Planning a wedding is three parts headache to one part romance — especially as a new immigrant. The best thing to do is stay calm, breathe deeply and get ready to jump over hurdles you never knew existed.
Meredith Price grew up in Marietta and bought a ticket to Tel Aviv on Sept. 10, 2001. She writes a column on Israeli innovations and cultural features for The Jerusalem Post. You can reach her at meredithmprice@yahoo.com.
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