The Jewish History Museum celebrated its sixth anniversary with the museum’s traditional start to a new year, the opening of the annual ketubah and antique wedding gown exhibit. The annual event opened with 13 models wearing gowns dating to the turn of the 20th century. The gowns, gathered from across the United States on loan to the Jewish History Museum, have one thing in common – they were all worn in a Jewish wedding ceremony. In addition to the modeled gowns, the exhibit includes eight other gowns that are much too fragile to wear, the oldest of which dates to the 1590s. Along with the gowns on display are ketubot ( Jewish marriage contracts) and the story of each wedding couple, all unique in their own right.
One of the oldest gowns on exhibit is the gold gown worn by Cordelia Perrine as she married Jacob Kaestner in Idaho in 1868. Cordelia and her sister Helena were Russian immigrants who were converts to the Jewish faith. It is possible that the women immigrated as “mail-order” brides, as so many of the women who immigrated to the northern frontier did in that era. Descendants of the women have heard family legends over the years about their ancestors “falling in love at the stage stop,” but never asked the questions to learn what originally brought the two single sisters to the frontier in the wild 1860s.
The favorite of the style show was a bright red 1920s flapper gown, worn on April 25, 1920, by Emily Sampliner as she married Rankin Kahn at the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego. Emily has been described as an “independent freethinker, who did not follow traditional paths in life.” A fierce supporter of a woman’s right to vote, Emily took time out from her suffragette work to marry, only because the “battle was won.” Ratification of the 19th amendment was assured, and indeed passed in August 1920, just four months after her wedding day. A lifelong member of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, Emily would champion women’s rights her entire life, while raising three independent-thinking daughters.
This year the exhibit also includes a mother-of-the-bride gown: an exquisite full-length gown custom-made for Mrs. Annie Rosinsky to wear at her daughter Bella’s wedding in 1934. The creation is a work of art with thousands of gold glass beads and sequins meticulously hand-sewn to the garment. The gown is too fragile to have been worn in the style show and much too heavy. The gold-beaded gown weighs in at a hefty 42 pounds. Bella’s wedding gown is also in the exhibit. The liquid satin gown features an amazing 14-foot satin train, which is detachable so that Bella could dance with her new husband, Dr. Irving Feigenbaum.
There are more traditional white wedding gowns in the exhibit as well. Among them is a gown worn in 1922 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Included with the gown are the couple’s two wedding documents, both signed by the same rabbi. One is a government-required “marriage license” dated Dec. 16, 1922, and the other is the couple’s ketubah dated Dec. 22, 1922. A 1905 gown worn by a 21-year-old operetta singer from Pescht (the Jewish section of Budapest) when she married Yozsef Eisler Hersch is included in the exhibit. The couple’s daughter Jolanka wore her mother’s gown in 1930 when she married Janos Brio in Budapest. Jolanka brought her mother’s wedding gown and her parent’s ketubah with her when she and Janos escaped to the United States in 1938, with the understanding that her parents were to follow in the near future. Her parents did not survive the Holocaust. The white 1930s-era Sisterhood Gown was worn by a multitude of brides in the Depression era here in Tucson. Many brides could not afford a wedding gown for their special day, so congregation sisterhoods across the nation each purchased a gown that was loaned to various brides. The gown on exhibit at the Jewish History Museum was one of three gowns owned by Tucson’s Temple Emanu-El’s Sisterhood. The liquid satin gown with a cathedral train has evidence that it was altered several times to accommodate various figures.
The exhibit will be on display through March; general admission is $5, free for Jewish History Museum members and students. The admission also includes access to Arizona’s only Holocaust Museum, which is located next door to the Jewish History Museum.
Eileen R. Warshaw, Ph.D., served as executive director of the Jewish history Museum in Tucson before retiring the end of January 2014.
