In the two years we devoted to planning our dream wedding, my husband and I enjoyed every aspect of baking meaningful aspects of our identities into the tiniest of wedding details. By doing so, we hoped to tell our story. We wanted to represent our Jewish identities, our starkly different cultural upbringings in the Bay Area and Mexico — and our four cats who unfortunately couldn’t attend the ceremony.
Héber Cruz Berber and I were married on Feb. 23, 2025, in San Miguel de Allende, a historic town in the mountains of central Mexico, a four-hour drive from Mexico City, Héber’s birthplace. I delightfully discovered after setting the wedding date that Feb. 23 is also the date that my maternal grandfather and his siblings arrived in the U.S. from Czechoslovakia in 1930.
Some of our decisions came easily. For instance, we chose to purchase my engagement ring and our wedding rings from a company called Brilliant Earth after reading in J. about the Jewish co-founders and their ethically sourced diamonds. Coincidentally, the wedding band that Héber selected, platinum with a single blue sapphire square, was called “The Ezra,” which happens to be his Hebrew name.
Choosing my wedding dress was a no-brainer. Since I was a little girl, I knew I wanted to wear my mother’s well-preserved wedding dress from 1989, an ivory polyester Jessica McClintock gown with a big bow in the back.
Finding a ketubah that resonated with us on a deep, personal level, both in artistry and writing, was a more daunting task. We scrolled through hundreds of beautiful options on Ketubah.com. We found incredible artists on Instagram who could design a custom ketubah depicting us with any images we wanted, including with our cats. But that felt too oriented to the present. Ultimately, we were searching for a ketubah that felt timeless and would represent the Jewish home we were building together.
We browsed ketubah samples and determined that a circular papercut style was our preference. Dozens of Google searches later, I struck gold when Amalya Nini’s website popped up. Nini, who lives in Israel, creates hand-painted papercut ketubahs in a variety of styles, many with bold, vibrant colors and Hebrew words of blessings around the circumference. We chose her cherry blossom ketubah for several reasons. The blossoms resemble those of the almond trees that bloom in the orchards around Bakersfield, where we met and fell in love. And our Los Gatos synagogue, Congregation Shir Hadash, happens to be located on Cherry Blossom Lane.
Then came the decisions about the ketubah text. We could choose from several standard Jewish denominational templates available on Nini’s website, or we could craft our own. Rabbi Nico Socolovsky, our spiritual leader at Shir Hadash, encouraged us to consider the latter. Oddly enough, we were drawn to the words of an interfaith ketubah template, even though we are both Jewish: “We pledge to be equal partners, loving friends, and supportive companions as we walk life’s path together. As we recognize our soulmates in each other may our hearts beat as one as we exchange these rings, and may our love continue to blossom as we grow old together.”
Our rabbi and his wife, Noga Socolovsky, helped us rewrite a portion of the text to transform it from an interfaith ketubah to one that reflected us, a cross-cultural Jewish couple: “Together we will create a Jewish home where our traditions are celebrated and where the values of our families are nurtured and passed on. We will build a home filled with joy, laughter, family, companionship, and learning, a home rich with love and compassion.”
Our wedding weekend captured these words perfectly.
The day before we tied the knot, we danced with our guests to live mariachi music in a park as gigantic paper-mâché puppets depicting me and Héber as bride and groom twirled on stilts around us. A donkey carrying a bouquet of flowers on its back walked with us as we paraded through the park. This was our callejoneada, the festive pre-wedding parade and a tradition in San Miguel de Allende that has been adopted by other cities.
The next day, Héber, wearing his blue-and-gold-accented tallit and his blue kippah with a gold Magen David in the center, walked toward our flower-adorned chuppah alongside his mother as the song “Sunrise, Sunset” from “Fiddler on the Roof” played on the violin. I walked down the aisle arm in arm with my mother to the violin instrumental of “Help Me Along,” a love ballad by Jack White. Our ceremony, officiated by Rabbi Socolovsky, followed Ashkenazi Jewish tradition with key moments, like our vow exchanges, spoken in Spanish.
I circled Héber seven times, and Héber broke the glass at the very end. The glass, with Hebrew for “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine,” came from Afikomen Judaica in Berkeley, as did the silver-embroidered organza chuppah we rented. Explanations of each Jewish custom were depicted in illustrations and summarized in both English and Spanish on our custom-drawn programs.
Our guests were offered kippot in vibrant patterns that matched the colorful hues of our wedding, handcrafted by MayaWorks, a nonprofit that employs Indigenous female artisans of Guatemala to support their economic development.
Rather than ordering a guest book for our friends and family to sign, we opted for a vintage white linen and lace-trimmed challah cover made in Israel that I found on eBay and asked guests to use fabric pens to leave us messages that we will cherish on many Shabbat dinners to come.
We even symbolically included our cats. Our welcome table was adorned with four hand-painted wooden cat figures we purchased at a local Mexican market.
Just before dancing the hora with our family and friends and getting lifted on chairs, Héber and I began our wedding reception with a nod to his Mexican heritage. We hit the dance floor with a choreographed salsa dance, set to “El Amor,” a duet sung by Tito “El Bambino” and Jenni Rivera. We nailed the steps, thanks to months of dance lessons and practice.
Of course, not everything went according to plan. For instance, we discovered during our ceremony that our vow books had disappeared. We waited several long minutes until they were found. But even that didn’t take away from our special day. In fact, it added to the stories we get to tell.