By Michael Keller
At her wedding table, Jenny turns to her new husband Ifthikar and says to him, “I don’t know how I lived for 43 years without you.” Jenny looks through the veil of a traditional Jewish bride. Ifthikar smiles and says something too softly to hear in his Pakistani accent. They were married in their friend’s living room in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony.
On the fireplace, portraits of famous rabbis in beards and black hats are arranged like family photos. In preparation for the event, women have placed chocolates in the shape of swans on the table. An older woman asks the singer of the band if he too would be interested in meeting a nice Jewish girl to marry. She may happen to know someone.
Jenny and Ifthikar did not simply meet at an Orthodox wedding, however. “When I first met him,” Jenny told me a few weeks ago, “I set his ring tone to this shrill noise so I wouldn’t answer because I was dating a rabbi. He would call every night, though. I called him ‘Itchy’ because he got under my skin.” “I knew he was the one for me,” she says.
Jenny moved to Brooklyn a little under a year ago from Florida after slowly becoming more religious over the past ten years. Ifthikar, or Yitzi as Jenny refers to him as, was born in Pakistan to a Syrian Jewish mother and first moved to America 33 years ago. They share a storefront on the section of Coney Island Ave. known as Little Pakistan out of which Jenny publishes a weekly newsmagazine for Orthodox women and Ifthikar runs a car service. And oh right, they are also both attorneys. They met when Jenny was selling ad space for her magazine.
Their businesses serve both the Jewish and the Pakistani residents of Midwood. To hear Jenny explain it, the arrangement sounds natural. “Muslims pray roughly the same number of times a day as we do,” she says. “They don’t eat pork. Women cover their hair. They wear a different scarf but it’s the same idea.”
If you ask shopkeepers along Coney Island Avenue how business is doing they will say that since 9/11 and since the arrest of the man who tried to bomb Times Square, business is not so good. Ask Jenny about the Orthodox and she will tell you about the two times this month that she has been verbally assaulted about her faith. But if she tells you this story she will laugh at the end and proudly say how Ifthikar chased one of the men out of the store.
“We need to defend each other,” she says, “and forget about this little scrap of land on the other side of the world.”
During the wedding ceremony I and three other men hold up the corners of the huppah, a prayer shawl that is held above the couple. Underneath the huppah are the bride, groom, rabbi, two witnesses, and several women. No one in the room is sitting. They crowd behind and to the sides of the rabbi as close as they can get.
A wedding is beautiful, the rabbi says, because the space below the huppah is filled by the divine presence at the moment of union. And if you combine and rearrange the letters in Jenny’s and Ifthikar’s Hebrew names, he says, you get the Hebrew word for “whole.”
After the ceremony the men dance in one room and the women in the next. Orthodox men take Ifthikar by the arm and by the hand and they dance around him in concentric circles. They grab his arms and form chains. They pile their yarmulkes on his head like school boys teasing a friend.
It is a mitzvah, a good deed, to make the bride and groom smile on his wedding day. They sit Ifthikar and Jenny down in a chair and pretend to polish their shoes with their ties, bringing them water to rehydrate, trying to make them smile.
But before the men and women are led off to separate rooms they are together under the huppah crowded with their guests. Behind the folds of her dress, Jenny and Ifthikar are holding hands.
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