Friday, August 27, 2021

Love in the Time of Corona pt. 4 (or Better Late Than Never)

Instead of sitting around waiting until we could have the wedding we had planned (although the wedding I have always dreamed of would be in a jungle, on the beach, with African drum music. Either that or at a drive through burger joint. When the burgers are ready, the wedding’s over and everyone goes home.), we decided to just have the chuppah somewhere outside with 20 attendees.

There was no point in waiting for the original date we had planned either so we decided to just have it two weeks from then. We already had the photographer, makeup and hair person, and someone to rent a chuppah from. So we just had to find a day when all 3 of them and the Rabbi were available. Surprisingly, this was the least complicated part of the whole wedding planning process. The chuppah lady gave us a few days the chuppah was available the week we wanted, the makeup artist’s kids were coming out of isolation at the beginning of that week, and the photographer and Rabbi were pretty flexible. So we made it work somehow (or perhaps we had some help from above).

We also had to find a location to have the chuppah. Since neither of us knows any rich people with large yards in Jerusalem (obviously we just don’t know the right people and should probably work on this), we were going to have to do it in a public place. So we took a walk one evening on the boardwalk in Armon Hanetziv, overlooking the Old City. We found a large gazebo down below on a quiet path, away from the sounds of people and traffic. We knew that was it. It was beautiful, quiet, and relatively close to us.

It also meant getting permission from the municipality. A little bit of paperwork? No big deal, right?

I couldn’t find any number to call on the city website about a permit for an outdoor event so I called the municipality hotline. The woman gave me a number to call. Then THAT woman gave me another number to call, and about 5 numbers later I got to Dudu from the gardening dept. I told him we just wanted to have a chuppah outside with up to 20 people. He said he’d send me the paperwork to sign and we just had to return it with scanned copies of our ID cards. No big deal.

A few minutes later, I received a form in my inbox containing 11 conditions that had to be met, including a 10,000 shekel deposit. Dudu then received a very angry email from me. In response, he agreed to waive the deposit. We had to fill out a bunch more forms, but eventually got our permit.


As an aside, a month or so later the city started publicizing options for outdoor weddings in various different spots around the city to help couples who still wanted to get married but couldn’t do it in a hall. I like to think that my angry email had something to do with that, but I’ll probably never know.

The wedding was beautiful, and apparently there were fireworks being set off behind us over the Old City during the ceremony. Afterwards, the celebrants went to a nice restaurant in the First Station where they kept bringing out food, and then when we thought they were done bringing out food, they brought out more food. And then when we thought it MUST be time for dessert they brought out more food.

The REAL fun started after the wedding though. Corona bureaucracy is even worse than regular bureaucracy because none of the government offices are open. Opening up a bank account was fun. Just kidding, we failed at that. Apparently if your source of income is in cash, you and your cash are unwelcome at the bank, whose job is to store your money. We couldn’t register our marriage until we got our marriage license, but because we went through Tzohar to get married (an independent organization whose purpose is to be the intermediate between the couple and the Rabbinate) and because they had closed down all offices except the one in Lod (literally the armpit of the country), and because they insisted we come in in person to show them Gil’s divorce certificate (which had been filed with the Rabbinate anyway), and because neither of us had any inclination whatsoever to take the bus to Lod, we didn’t have a marriage license. They sent us emails periodically to remind us that we still had to do this and after trying to work something out with them (showing them the license on Zoom, them contacting the Rabbinate to get confirmation of its existence, sending them a copy since Gil doesn’t trust the post office enough to send an original), we point blank refused to come in. Eventually Gil discovered that he could order another certified copy from the Rabbinate in the mail, and we could just send that. I would just like to stress the fact that we had to order a copy of a certificate from the Rabbinate, originally filed with the Rabbinate, just so that it could be re-filed with the Rabbinate in a different file, in order for us to get our marriage certificate. Not only that, but Tzohar reminded us that we had only sent them 2 copies of pictures of us instead of 3 copies each. So in addition to the divorce certificate, we had to send them another copy of the passport pictures, which they then stapled to the marriage certificate and mailed back to us. Thankfully at around that time they reopened most of the government offices so we could actually file the documents (which need to be filed in person regardless of whether or not a global pandemic has forced the government to close these offices). So we were finally able to change our family status with the government 6 months after we got married. Better late than never I guess.




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