The smaller room was empty. So the rabbi had me pull down my pants to see if I was circumcised. The word had not reached this group that nearly all male Americans of that era were circumcised.
So we were allowed to fill out more papers and pay for a few stamps. We were nearly finished and ready to run out the door. The last question on the form was the name of the rabbi who would perform the marriage. Since we had never expected to get this far, that day, I hadn’t given any thought to finding a rabbi.
I decided to try for the most common name in Hebrew. I said our rabbi was Moses Abramovich.
We rushed to the nearest phone booth and found two rabbi Moses Abramoviches in the Tel Aviv directory. The second one said he would be glad to perform the wedding. He would have to provide the food because that year was a sabbatical year and we couldn’t eat food from a Jewish farm.
The wedding date arrived and we brought all our friends and neighbors. The rabbi also had his minion (10 orthodox men). So I paid them off and thanked them for coming,
The two great ironies in this story are that when my wife and I got divorced fourteen years later, the alimony was very close to the original divorce settlement. And my wife was a the daughter of an Irish Roman Catholic family.
This never seemed to bother anyone. My children have been comfortable as Jews. About 45 years after the wedding my ex-wife got her mitochondrial DNA tested by the National Geographic.
She had all four alleles for an Ashkenazi woman.