Wedding of peace’: Children of Russian and Ukrainian rabbis marry in Jerusalem

At the wedding, Minister of Housing and Construction of the Israeli government, Zeev Elkin, who migrated to Israel from Ukraine in 1990, said a prayer for the return of all the Israeli hostages held in Gaza.

By TPS

Rivka Lazar, daughter of the Chief Rabbi of Russia Berl Lazar, and Sholom Wolf, son of the Chief Rabbi of Odessa and Southern Ukraine Avraham Wolf, got married yesterday in Jerusalem.

Three thousand guests attended the ceremony, where the couple stood beneath the chuppah (traditional Jewish wedding canopy). The wedding host announced that this was going to be “the chuppah of the piece.”

“The Chassidic world has always transgressed boundaries,” one of the guests of the ceremony who asked not to be identified told TPS-IL. “It is not really so important that Russia and Ukraine are at war. Jews still remain friends and relatives, and that is how it always has been.”

When the marriage was announced last November at the annual Congress of Chabad Ambassadors in New York, the popular joke was that US President Donald Trump had done the ‘shidduch’ (the matchmaking process in Hebrew).

At the wedding, Minister of Housing and Construction of the Israeli government, Zeev Elkin, who migrated to Israel from Ukraine in 1990, said a prayer for the return of all the Israeli hostages held in Gaza.

The guests were offered a souvenir gift from the wedding – a collection of articles by the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the spiritual leader of the Chabad movement.

Berl Lazar has never condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Unlike leaders of other confessions in Russia, including Russian Patriarch Kirill or the Grand Mufti of Russia, Rawil Ğaynetdin, he has not supported it, either.