Juliana & Elie | Chic Jewish Winter Wedding at The Roosevelt Hotel, Manhattan, New York
Originally published from Smashing the Glass (Style & insiration for a super-cool Jewish wedding)
Decadent, luxurious and hopelessly romantic, Juliana and Elie’s chic winter wedding held at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan last February is utterly sumptuous.
Despite having a very traditional Jewish Orthodox Wedding, they still wanted to play around on the margins, and incorporate as many of their own details into their W-day as they could.
One of the creative elements I love most is their invitations which Juliana designed herself. She incorporated the most delicious intertwined Hebrew calligraphy and combined it with an english font inspired by Elie’s favourite brand of scotch! Their invitation suite also included a map highlighting milestones in their relationship and had lots of lovely production finishes like a letterpress finish and a wax seal on each envelope.
I also love their idea of ’donation’ favours where in place of traditional favours they made a contribution to a charity close to their hearts, and placed small notes at each plate with a picture of themselves, explaining the donation.
Juliana and Elie were set up on a blind date by Juliana’s roommate, Rena, who had gone to high school with Elie. Rena thought that Elie might be a good person for Juliana to meet, and she was evidently right! Let’s hear all about the couple’s special day from the lovely bride herself…
Juliana the Bride: Our wedding was at the The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Since our wedding was in February, we wanted the location to still be accessible in the event of inclement weather. We loved the Roosevelt as soon as we walked through it; it was the first of the many venues we’d looked at that we could actually envision ourselves getting married in. They had many distinct rooms available, and a fantastic balcony / hallway between the tish room and where the badeken was. Elie being danced down that hallway was one of my favourite moments of the wedding. As one of my friends remarked on her video of the badeken: “That was epic”.
Since it was a winter wedding, we kept it simple with black, grey, ivory and hits of gold. We also incorporated hot pink into the floral arrangements as well as the Bridesmaid’s dresses.
HAIR + MAKE-UP
For both hair and make-up I wanted to look like the best version of myself, so I went with people I had used before. Ben Yeo did my hair, I have been getting my hair cut by him for many years, and he is fantastic. Jill at JK Flashy did the make up for my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s wedding as well, so i knew she was very talented!
Elie has know the Rabbi who married us since he was 3 (he used to baby-sit for him, and had been the officiant at his brother’s wedding the year before ours) Our ceremony was fairly traditional, but I did give Elie a ring in the yichud room afterwards. Elie also filled out our ketubah himself, which was a beautiful laser cut paper in ivory and gold by Danny Azoulay.