Wendy Bensussen had all but given up dating when John Lefor sent her a message on JDate.
“‘What the heck,’” she had said. “‘I’ll just respond.’”
They went on their first date last November, and Wendy planned, as usual, to get there first and sit at the end of the bar in case she needed to make a quick exit.
But John had beaten her to it. When she arrived, he had already gotten a table. Fortunately, they ended up hitting it off.
“We closed the restaurant,” she said dreamily. “It was kind of magical.”
This is a second marriage for both Wendy and John.
“I kept saying, ‘I’m never getting married again,’” Wendy said. “In June he came home with a diamond ring. It was in a gold bag on my desk.”
Thinking John had gotten her some Godiva chocolates, she pushed the bag aside and started working. He suggested she open the bag.
“He said he didn’t care if it was a Jewish or civil marriage, he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me.”
Around that time, Wendy got an email from Ty Alhadeff asking her about a historic ketubah that was lent to the University of Washington’s Sephardic Studies Program for its digital collection. The ornate Jewish marriage contract comes from the Bensussen family of Tekirdag, Turkey, in 1919.
It turns out the ketubah belonged to Wendy’s great uncle, Shelomo. Not only that, but on a trip to Istanbul’s Jewish history museum, Wendy saw a similar ketubah, and discovered that her family’s design had been a model for others.
Wendy and John commissioned papercut artist Micol Bayer with creating a ketubah based on the historic one.
“Micol took aspects of that ketubah and built our ketubah around it,” Wendy said. “We were only going to have a Jewish marriage, and it was tied historically to my family.”
Wendy and John were married in a small ceremony on January 22. Mazal tov!
— Emily K. Alhadeff