Wendy Salganik Davis always dreamed of finding “a good home for my wedding dress.”
A Pikesville native who worked as a speech pathologist in the Baltimore City Public Schools system, Davis was married in 1973 at Chizuk Amuno Congregation in the same dress as her late mother, Phyllis Rosen Salganik, in 1948.
Davis and her husband, Bob, had two boys but no daughters. So for the past 44 years, the gown has been packed in tissue and stored safely away in Davis’ closet.
But in June — the traditional month for weddings — the dress, replete with long sleeves and a short train, will breathe again, in an exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Maryland called “Just Married! Wedding Stories from Maryland.” It opens June 18 and runs through Sept. 17.
Sharing the stage with the Salganik-Davis dress are other wedding gowns and garments; invitations, artifacts and accessories; wedding cake toppers and party favors; secular marriage licenses and ketubot (Jewish wedding contracts); a groom’s “best suit” worn at his 1931 nuptials; wedding photographs of entire generations long departed; and an empty cigar box from a 1904 reception that once held pungent party trinkets.
Joanna Church, the JMM’s collections manager, curated the exhibition, which was designed by the Baltimore-based Ashton Design firm. She said the museum was initially interested in showcasing a traveling exhibition about Jewish weddings, but when that didn’t work out she realized “we had a lot of wedding stuff here already.” The museum then issued a call to the community requesting contributions and loans to complement the JMM collection’s general archive of 11,000 objects and materials.
What developed was an exhibition organized in five sections that tells the stories of Jewish weddings using textiles, photos, interactive activities and oral histories exploring and interpreting different aspects of the Jewish wedding experience from the 1830s through today. Themes include the roles of family members in the planning and execution of Jewish weddings, how couples reinterpret traditions to fit their needs, the business of weddings and interfaith and same-sex marriages.
Some of the dresses in the museum’s archives date to the late 1890s when the Jewish population in Baltimore was about 35,000 and many of the brides and grooms were immigrants.
Interestingly, there is a chuppah in the exhibition that started out as a wedding dress. The dress belonged to Ilene Cohen, a JMM volunteer who grew up in Montgomery County, lives downtown and was married in 1986. Her daughter, Dena Cohen Blaustein, was willing to try on her mother’s dress while planning her own wedding last year but wasn’t crazy about the style and it didn’t fit.
Instead of having the dress altered, Cohen decided to have it transformed into the chuppah for her daughter and the groom, Ryan Blaustein of Olney.
“I’d never heard of [transforming a dress into a chuppah] before,” said Cohen, but her friend, textile artist Julia Feldman, mentioned the idea. And although seeing the dress from her big day cut up on a table was a bit distressing, she loved such a purposeful repurposing.
Dismantled, the gown produced about 18 feet of material. Feldman used some extra matching fabric to work the magic necessary to approximate the open-sided tent of Abraham, a portable home of hospitality echoed by the chuppah.
Feldman said she thought the repurposing captured the essence of l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation. “It’s a way to share without actually wearing your mother or grandmother’s gown,” she said.
And it beckoned Dena Cohen Blaustein to her vows in a similar way that it will beckon visitors at the JMM. “I noticed it while walking down the aisle and thinking how beautiful and special it was,” she said. “And we have a picture of my husband looking up at it during the ceremony and smiling.”
In addition to the on-site exhibition, the museum has created an online exhibition, “Marrying Maryland,” consisting of photos and wedding invitations submitted by members of the state’s Jewish community. The museum also will feature a series of exhibition-related public programs including lectures, panel discussions, children’s activities and a Stoop storytelling program on Jewish weddings.
“I’m hoping people will come away thinking about what they’ve seen in relation to their own weddings and those of their friends and family members,” Church said. “And I hope people might be surprised by what’s on display, with a deeper appreciation of what we can learn from the material culture and what makes it so special and interesting.”
The JMM is located at 15 Lloyd St. For information about “Just Married” and related programming, call 410-732-6400 or visit jewishmuseummd.org.
Top photo: Rabbi Meyer Zywica and Frances Friedlander (daughter of Rabbi Louis B. Friedlander of Baltimore) on their wedding day, 1950. (Photo courtesy Jewish Museum of Maryland)
Rafael Alvarez is a Baltimore-based freelance writer. Editor-in-Chief Alan Feiler contributed to this article.
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