page_title: History of the Jews in New Zealand
section_title: Early Jewish ceremonies
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Jews in New Zealand / Early Jewish ceremonies
caption_attribution_description: English: This is a copy of a wedding contract on parchment, given to me by my grandmother. It documents the wedding of her maternal great grandparents on June 1st, 1842 in Wellington New Zealand, two years after the city was founded, and it was the first Jewish wedding in Wellington, the second in the country (the first was in Auckland in 1841). The format of the ketubah (marriage contract) is a template, with the bride and groom's names filled in in another handwriting. It also contains the name of the Groom's brother, Solomon Levy, who promises in the contract to marry the bride should her husband die and she be childless (a nearly archaic promise in Anglo Jewish marriages in the 1840'a, although still practiced into the 1880's in Eastern Europe). The witnesses, Hort and Levin, were important early Jewish figures in Wellington public life. Esther Solomon's signature looks like she is barely literate, her husband, Benjamin's is much more fluid. . In a 1929 account of his life the eldest son of this union, born 1843 in New Zealand, Henry Emanuel Levy states his mother was married "by proxy" before leaving England, then married again "six months later," in NZ "by Hebrew rites."
context_page_description: The first Jewish settlers in New Zealand were Anglo-Jewish traders. Small numbers of Anglo-Jewish immigrants followed, some subsidized by a Jewish charity in London which had a mission of caring for the poor and orphaned young people in the community. These "subsidised" Jewish immigrants were also intended by their benefactors to be devout members of the fledgling Jewish community in Wellington, to which the respected English business leader Abraham Hort, Senior, was sent from London to organize along London religious lines. The difficulties of life in early colonial New Zealand, together with historically high rates of intermarriage, made it hard to maintain strict religious observation in any of the new congregations.
  Following news of gold rushes, Jewish immigrants poured in from new lands such as Germany, and then moved on when the boom was over.
context_section_description: The first Jewish ceremony in New Zealand was the marriage of businessman David Nathan to Rosetta Aarons, the widow of Captain Michael Aarons, on 31 October 1841. Their daughter, Sarah Nathan, born 10 January 1843, was the first known Jewish birth in New Zealand. The second ceremony, the marriage of Esther Solomon and Benjamin Levy was on 1 June 1842 in Wellington, according to the ketubah contract in Hebrew, witnessed by Alfred Hort (another of Abraham Hort Senior's sons) and another early Jewish emigrant Nathaniel William Levin. Levin, for whom the town of Levin was later named, soon married Hort Senior's daughter, Jessy, further connecting the small group of early Wellington Jews.
  In early 1843, Abraham Hort, Sr. arrived in Wellington, where he organised and promoted the Jewish community, with the approval of London's Chief Rabbi. Hort brought with him David Isaacs, also an alumnus of the Jews' Hospital. Isaacs served as Mohel (to perform circumcisions), shochet (kosher butcher) and chazan (Cantor/lay leader for services). The first religious service was performed soon after, on 7 January 1843. A few months later, the new community celebrated the birth of Benjamin's and Esther's first child, Henry Emanuel Levy, which Hort documented in a series of letters sent to The Jewish Chronicle (the premier London Jewish newspaper of the time).
  Acting on behalf of the community, Hort requested a plot of land for a synagogue and a plot of land for Jewish burials, offering himself as one of the trustees. The request was originally denied, the government responding that it didn't have the authority.
  The death of the Levy's second son, aged 8 months in 1845 was, Hort wrote to the Chronicle, "our first Jewish corpse" and the "first Jewish burial" in the new Jewish cemetery.
  Throughout the early 1840s, Hort's letters to the London Jewish Chronicle and the Voice of Jacob reveal the difficulty of maintaining a Jewish community that could barely muster a minyan, owing to the demands of making a living, and complaining how few Jewish shopkeepers respected the sabbath by closing their doors, let alone celebrating Jewish holidays properly.
  A Māori massacre, the threat of forced militia service for all, and the extreme difficulty of making a living, took their toll on the small community. Isolation rapidly gave way to intermarriage. Solomon Levy quickly married Jane Harvey, the 14-year-old Christian shipmate of Esther Solomon and Elizabeth Levy. Although only one of his eight surviving children chose Judaism as a religion, Levy helped found the first Wellington synagogue and taught Hebrew to Jewish children for many years.
caption: Marriage Contract of Esther Solomon and Benjamin Levy, Wellington, 1 June 1842.
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