Books & Manuscripts

Personalize Your Ketubah (Jewish Wedding Contract) with These 5 Tips

Getting married? Jewish? You’ll need a ketubah. Youve found one online. Thats the easy part. Next step–filling in the blanks, and thats where it can get unclear! Of course, theres the basic information that, if you dont know it already,you’ve got bigger problems–such as the bride and grooms names, the date of your ceremony, and where it is taking place. But it can getmighty complicatedas you go further to hebrew names, etc.

Here are the top 5 tips for personalizing your ketubah to make it easy and right.

1) Let your rabbi or cantor do it! OK, not actually personalize the ketubah itself (have you SEEN his or her handwriting?) but complete the information for the ketubah artist or calligrapher. Seriously, the fastest way to have your ketubah personalized the right way is to let yourrabbi or cantor complete the form provided by your ketubah artist or vendor.

2) Dont create Hebrew names. For any non-jewish parties, don’t just make up a hebrew name. Instead, ask your ketubah vendor to transliterate your name–phonetically spell it out in hebrew characters. And if youre jewish with a yiddush name, ask yourofficiantif you can use that or if he or she will require you to use an equivalent Hebrew name instead (e.g. Sarah instead of Sorah).

3) Include parents but not grandparents. In Hebrew, your name usually reads: Rachel, daughter of Joshua and Sarah. Of course, your father, Joshua, is technically Joshua, son of Samuel and Rivka,” and your mother “Sarah, daughter of Abraham and Talia. But just stick to your parents. Saying Rachel, daughter of Joshua, son of Samuel and Rivka, and Sarah, daughter of Abraham and Talia is just too complicated.So leave your grandparents out. If you prefer, you may also choose to omit your parents’ names. And leave our all last names.

4) Know the exact time of your ceremony. In the hebrew calendar, the date starts and ends at sundown. So you will need to know whether your ceremony takes place before or after sunset to get the proper hebrew date.

5) Are you having an Orthodox or Conservative wedding? Youll need to provide a little more information, including the brides status (whether this is the brides first marriage–or more technically, whether she is a virgin–or if shes been married before and divorced or widowed, and if shes converted), if either the bride or grooms fathers are levite or cohain (if you dont know, typically it means no), and whether your rabbi or cantor wants the ‘regal’ – the descending part of the letter in the ‘koof’ – in the word ‘vkaninah to be filled in or left out. Lets make it easy – talk to your rabbi or cantor about these items for personalizing your traditional ketubah text.

There’s more to know, but if you follow these suggestions and talk to your officiant, your ketubah should be properly completed.

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Tags: hebrew letter after koph, hebrew letter koph, hebrew letter meanings, hebrew letter shin, hebrew letters

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Books & Manuscripts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.