In the new movie “Bride Wars,” it’s all about the wedding. Two best friends/brides-to-be battle it out with one another over which one of them gets to have their wedding at New York City’s ritzy Plaza Hotel.
Despite a wedding-obsessed culture, dramatized in the film, marital counselors recommend that couples spend some prenuptial time thinking past the big day about what married life will be like once the glass has been smashed and the knot has been tied.
That’s where two programs—the “Chuppah Project” and “Marriage Preparation,”—come in handy. These two programs of the Jewish Child & Family Services (JCFS), a JUF/JF partnership agency, give tools to Jewish engaged and married couples to help them navigate a long and happy marriage.
“We have a 50 percent divorce rate in the Jewish community just like the rest of the world,” said Rosalie Greenberger, LCSW, a JCFS clinician and life-education network worker and coordinator of the Chuppah Project and Marriage Preparation. “This is our effort to pay more attention to the challenges of marriage. While we can’t make any claims about decreasing the divorce rate, I hope we will increase marriage satisfaction.”
Launched in 2001, the Chuppah Project offers a daylong workshop in a group setting with Jewish engaged couples and newlyweds. Facilitated by JCFS social workers/family life educators, couples learn about marriage within a Jewish framework and discuss topics that often rear their heads in marriage. The program costs $150 for the day, which includes lunch. If a couple has financial hardship, the fee can be adjusted.
In 2007, the Chuppah Project expanded to include Marriage Preparation. The newer program provides similar premarital counseling to the Chuppah Project, but is conducted in a one-on-one setting with a counselor. Individual couples attend up to eight sessions with a JCFS social worker/family life educator. Couples complete a lengthy online inventory called “Prepare and Enrich,” widely used in the Jewish community, that asks questions about the couple’s shared future. The cost is $75 per session.
In both programs, couples learn skills, complete exercises, and enhance ways of thinking that increase their odds of marital success. The couples discuss a host of topics including expectations, personality issues, communication, conflict resolution, finances, leisure, sexuality, children and parenting, equalitarian roles, religion, and family.
As newlyweds, spouses must figure out ways to distinguish their new family from their families of origin. “In both programs, we talk about the role of family and how to balance one’s own family with creating your new family,” Greenberger said. “The programs help with the balancing act and putting the couple first, but doing so respectfully.”
Judaism is another central issue discussed in the sessions. When two members of a couple are both Jewish, they usually assume that religion is a non-issue, according to Greenberger. But, in fact, there are vast differences in Jewish backgrounds. Jewish life plays out differently in every Jewish home. As a married couple, spouses must decide what role Judaism will play in their new household, such as whether to light candles every Friday night and how to celebrate the holidays.
Newlyweds Pam and Scott Kaplan, of Lakeview, took the Marriage Preparation sessions with Greenberger. “I am such an advocate for this class,” said Scott, who had been married once before. “Any couple, Jewish or non-Jewish, should go through something like this. You need to know what you’re getting into because it’s pretty heavy.”
The Kaplans, who met on JDate, married in October of 2007. Pam said their wedding planning was “pretty mellow” and the sessions gave them the opportunity to think less about the wedding day and more about their future and each other. “There was an exercise where we each told the other person what it was we loved about them and why we wanted to marry him/her, which is something you don’t often take the time to stop and do,” she said. “When you actually formulate how you feel about the other person and say it right to them with somebody else sitting right there, it’s pretty real. It was really nice to do.”
To learn more about the Chuppah Project or Marriage Preparation, call Rosalie Greenberg at (224) 625-2819, e-mail her at MarriagePrep@jcfs.org, or visit www.jcfs.org. The Chuppah Project is available to engaged couples and newlyweds. Marriage Preparation is available to engaged couples as well as married couples at various stages of marriage and may be adapted to fit the needs of each couple.
Jewish Child and Family Services (JCFS) is a partner in serving our community supported by the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.
