By Bruce F. Lowitt
OLDSMAR, Florida — By the time Dr. and Mrs. Bernardo Stein of Seminole, Florida, and Mr. and Mrs. David Abelson of Oldsmar, Florida, had finished the guest list for the wedding of their children, the number had mushroomed well past 400.
By the time Arlyn Stein and Adam Abelson walked down the aisle last Dec. 19, the list of “guests” had shrunk to, well, zero. The entire wedding party consisted of the bride and groom, their parents, three siblings and two grandparents. Oh, and Cooper, their 10-month-old mini-poodle.
That is one way to conduct a wedding during a pandemic.
“With our parents, both of ours, cutting the guest list was like going through the different stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining,” Adam said, laughing. “It was like, ‘What about just half of the party?’ ‘No, we can’t do that.’ ‘What about a third of the party?’ ‘We can’t do that.’ ”
“At the end of the day,” Arlyn said, “it was more for the safety of our families. Our families’ lives are more important than our wedding. It was tough for them but once it was decided, they were all in.”
They decided against a Zoom wedding, not wanting to deal with the technology and all its potential problems, not to mention someone forgetting to hit the mute button at an inopportune time.
If their nuptial had anything positive resulting from the uninvited arrival last year of COVID-19, it was this: “When you’re together with just a core group of family,” David Abelson said, “it’s a more emotional event because you’re not introducing everybody to everybody and wondering who knows who and if everybody’s comfortable.”
And this:
“Usually,” Stephanie Stein said, “at the end of the weekend you’re thinking you didn’t even get a chance to say, ‘Hello,’ or ‘How are you?’ or ‘Goodbye.’ It’s over.”
And this:
“For the entire time since the kids got engaged,” Jeanie Abelson said, “for the High Holy Days, for birthdays, for anniversaries, the Steins and the Abelsons, we were the family bubble.”
And, at least in this case, the families saved a lot of money. When it came to canceling the reservation for the St. Petersburg, Florida., hotel, with its corporate ballroom capable of handling the crowd of more than 400, “they were very understanding and generous,” Bernardo Stein said.
It began with a Birthright Trip
Adam, now 28, and Arlyn, 27, attended Berkeley Prep in Tampa, Florida, one year apart, in middle school and high school. “I knew of Adam, actually had a crush on him,” she said. “He didn’t know I existed.”
Years later, when Arlyn was attending Washington University in St. Louis and Adam had graduated from Duke University, he wanted to go on a Birthright Trip to Israel.|
“During a break in my senior year my mom and I ran into Jeanie Abelson at Costco,” Arlyn said, “and in conversation we mentioned I was going on a Birthright Trip and she said, ‘Oh, do you know my son, Adam? He’s concerned he’s running out of time. Can I mention you’re going?’”
Arlyn and Adam, each dating other people at the time, sat together on the flights from Tampa to New York and on to Tel Aviv “and I would say that on that plane (to Israel) I knew we were going to get married,” Arlyn said. “Maybe I should say ‘I hoped.’”
“We were inseparable on that trip,” Adam said, “When we got back we looked at our significant others and we thought, ‘This isn’t going to work any more.’”
Adam was working with his father as a financial advisor for Morgan Stanley in Palm Harbor. Arlyn was moving to Washington, D.C., to work in human resources for Capital One. They long-distance dated for a year and a half, then she convinced the company to let her work remotely and she moved to Tampa.
“From the moment we started dating it was serious and was aimed at getting married,” Adam said.
‘What about the grandparents?’|
They announced their engagement in September of 2019. At first they thought about a remote wedding with just the families. Their parents were appalled. Why raise children if not to celebrate them with, well, everyone?
Besides, there were grandmothers to consider. Shirley, David Abelson’s mother, was 94 then and wouldn’t be able to travel. “We call her Nana Gorgeous because she really is,” Adam said. And Sivia Stephanie Stein’s mother, who lives in Atlanta, is 77.
So they decided on a local wedding.
A year ahead of time they booked the hotel for Dec. 19, 2020. And when the pandemic became a reality in the United States they initially decided to postpone the wedding for a year, to Dec. 18, 2021, assuming COVID-19 would be gone by then.
But by last Labor Day, Adam said, with vaccines still in the distance and the future more uncertain, “We asked ourselves, ‘What are we going to do, move it back another year? What about the grandparents?’ We decided we weren’t going to let the COVID get in the way of the rest of our lives.”
They also considered getting legally married last year, having a rabbi officiating at a ceremony in one of the parents’ homes and doing a big ceremony and reception later on .
“But we wanted Nana to be there for the real deal,” Arlyn said. “So we planned, in two months, a full wedding for a total of 11 people – but as though there would be 400. We had all the flowers we would have had at a big wedding, and a photographer, a videographer, a string quartet …”
The only thing missing was the Miami-based band they had booked for the reception and then canceled. Instead, Elliot Stein, Arlyn’s brother, was the deejay.
l’dor v’dor
The ceremony was held in the Tiffany Room at the Belleview Inn, what remains of the old Belleview-Biltmore Hotel in Belleair, Florida. Adam’s siblings, Amy and Alan, walked Cooper down the aisle.
Gary Klein, rabbi emeritus of Temple Ahavat Shalom in Palm Harbor, officiated, “and I felt very safe because Adam and Arlyn and their families took every precaution to assure everyone’s safety,” including having the entire wedding party tested a week earlier.
The chuppa came from Botanica in Tampa, which also provided corsages and boutonnieres. Arlyn’s wedding-dress designer is Israeli and the couple got their ketubah from Israel, working via Zoom with an artist and calligrapher to design it “because we wanted some Israeli elements since our love story is set in Israel,” the bride said.
One minor problem: their best friends, Ted and Andrea Cohen, whose ketubah Adam and Arlyn had signed, were going to reciprocate on the day of the wedding – but on Friday night, when Adam and Arlyn got home from the rehearsal dinner at the Opal Sands Resort on Clearwater Beach, Fla., they found a voicemail from Andrea. She’d tested positive. The ketubah was signed in January.
Tisch and Bedeken
The tallis used in the ceremony “was Adam’s late grandfather’s, Nana’s husband’s,” Arlyn said. “She was holding it in her lap and presented it to our parents, who draped it over us, so it was a very l’dor v’dor (from generation to generation) moment for us and special for her.”
And Arlyn’s late great-grandfather, Joseph Schwartzman, an immigrant from Russia, had been a cantor in Atlanta. “We had a recording of him doing the Sheva Brachot (seven blessings) when the bride circles the groom, and we played that,” Arlyn said. “ It was special to my grandmother, his daughter, who was there.
“We even did a Tisch and Bedeken,” a custom in which men and women celebrate separately before the groom is marched in to see his bride amid much fanfare. “Having only 11 people, we had more time to do some of these activities.
“Still, it was painful not having groomsmen or bridesmaids, our best friends, aunts and uncles and cousins,” Arlyn said, “all the people you imagine would be there.”
The family then walked about 50 yards to the Steins’ condominium at Belleview Place for the reception, including a catered sitdown dinner.
“We danced the hora. We were lifted in the chairs,” Adam said. “We didn’t think we were going to do any of those traditional things because of the size of the party but we made it happen.”
And Alan, Adam’s brother, had arranged for many of the friends and relatives who would have been there to submit video clips of congratulation to a website that compiled them. They were played at the reception.
Arlyn and Adam plan to return to Israel on their first anniversary – A honeymoon and to get their wedding bands engraved with each other’s Hebrew names.
Oh, and one more thing:|
“Elliot lives in Nashville,” Arlyn said. “He’s a doctor in residency (at Vanderbilt University Medical Center). He’s 30 years old, 6-foot-7, handsome, kind, philanthropic and single and my biggest disappointment is that my bachelor of a brother gave one of the best speeches he ever gave at our wedding and no one was there to hear it and to go home and tell their daughter, ‘I have a great guy for you.’”
And Adam added: “This is the real reason we even agreed to do this story. We’re trying to get Elliot married off.”
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A version of this story appeared in The Jewish Press of Tampa Bay. Bruce F. Lowitt is a freelance writer based in southwestern Florida.