Dana Gershovitz, 28, and her partner were supposed to get married tomorrow but were forced to postpone their wedding by a month. “We’re not disconnected from reality. There was talk of an attack and I kept in mind that it could happen,” Dana said. “I’m a very optimistic person, so I didn’t let it take over my feelings. In a way I let go because I knew it wasn’t in my control. I said, ‘If it happens, we’ll deal with it.’ And then it happened.”
“The first alert on Saturday morning caught me in bed and I immediately understood the situation. I knew I’d be called up for reserve duty in the Home Front Command, and I realized there wouldn’t be a wedding and that we’d have to postpone,” she said. “It’s not an easy mental challenge. There’s a storm of emotions, a lot of disappointment and a lot of uncertainty, but the reserve duty distracts me. For me it’s a bit of an escape.”
At first, Dana and her partner considered holding a small event at home. But after the venue owners offered them a new date a month later, they decided to go ahead with the wedding as planned.
“A month from now is still within the risk range. I know it might also be canceled, and I hope this war won’t last beyond a month, but we don’t want to postpone too much,” she said. “That concern exists because we live in Israel and nothing here is stable, but it would exist in July or even a year from now. We live from one event to the next.”
Roy Shafir and his partner, both reserve officers who met about a decade ago during their military service, were supposed to get married yesterday. Because of the situation, they were forced to postpone their wedding to another date. “On Saturday morning, the moment we heard the first siren, we looked at each other and understood it wasn’t going to happen,” Shafir said.
“It took us four days to reach the rabbinate to move the date,” he added, referring to Israel’s state-run religious authority that oversees Jewish marriages. “In the end we got a new date on Independence Day. Usually you don’t do that because it falls during the Omer period, but we received special permission.”
“It’s very hard to postpone a wedding. We had a few days to mourn all the plans. Yesterday was an especially tough day, but the hope is to come out of it,” Shafir said.
“Unfortunately this isn’t the first time we’ve postponed a wedding. We already postponed once because of reserve duty. We both wanted guests from our reserve unit to come to the wedding, and realizing we couldn’t celebrate without them made us delay it. Now this is the second time. We’ve been engaged for almost two years.”
They also considered holding a small wedding at home but ultimately decided they wanted to celebrate on a larger scale.
“At first we thought about having a small wedding on the original date, but Mai’s parents live in the north near the Lebanon border and we decided not to bring them to the center,” Shafir said. “And we don’t want to have a wedding in sadness.”
Asked whether they fear they may have to postpone again, Shafir said: “There’s a fear that we’ll be back in reserve duty or that there will be another attack. But when we postponed the first time we realized that no one can dictate our joy. It would be very disappointing if we have to postpone again, but we’ll deal with that too.”
‘We even thought about getting married in a shelter’
Koral Shaybet, 26, had planned to get married yesterday. The new date for her wedding is four months from now. “There was constant talk of an attack. I hoped it wouldn’t fall on the wedding, but the government had other plans,” she said.
“When the first siren sounded I still had a small hope it would happen. But a few hours later, when we saw things were escalating, we started looking for alternative dates and postponed to July,” she said.
“At first we even thought about getting married in a shelter. But you get married only once, and I’m someone who likes to fulfill my dreams. I want to feel like a bride and experience all the joy, so I decided to postpone.”
Asked how she feels about the decision, Shaybet said: “It feels like the heartbreak of a breakup. You realize everything you worked on for eight months simply isn’t going to happen.”
“Yesterday morning I woke up and cried. All these days I’ve been depressed, and only this morning, when we received a date along with a rabbi’s permission allowing us to marry during the Three Weeks,” a Jewish mourning period in the summer, “I finally feel better.”
Shaybet also fears she may have to postpone again. “The fear exists and it will stay with me for the next four months, but there’s nothing we can do,” she said. “If it’s postponed again — that’s from God.”