Weddings & Commitment Ceremonies
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The wedding ceremony is a time to share your love and commitment to each other, and to bring two different lives together as a couple and as a community. A ceremony which reflects each and every couple’s unique relationship, values and style. Which combines traditions with personal meaning that will be treasured by the couple, family, friends and community. The important thing to me is to honor that unique and blessed and rare moment, when two people find each other, fall in love and commit to spend their lives together.
I both officiate and co-officiate at Jewish, Inter-faith and all sorts of wedding ceremonies. Please contact me to talk about making your wedding experience meaningful, sacred, and joyful. Rabbi Tom was an amazing wedding officiant! He married my husband and I last year, and we could not have been happier! Our guests were raving about how beautifully he spoke at our ceremony, he was a pleasure to work with, and made the whole process easy and fun! We highly recommend his services! Lindsey and Aaron, IL
We loved having Rabbi Tom officiate our wedding. We don’t live in Chicago, but our wedding was there, so choosing a Rabbi was a bit of a challenge. We needed a Rabbi who could give us the guidance throughout the planning process to start our marriage on the right foot, and someone who would make our ceremony feel personal and meaningful. Rabbi Tom came highly recommended to us from a close friend, and from our first call with him, we were sold. He is a perfect balance of traditional and modern. He has a conversational and approachable way of making the Jewish values and traditions we care about so relevant and understandable. Throughout the process of planning our wedding, he was incredibly present and generous with his time, and flexible in his leadership, to give us the guidance, homily, songs, and prayers we wanted. Our conversations with Rabbi Tom leading up to the wedding challenged us to help strengthen our relationship and open up to each other in a new way. His guidance and advice has been immeasurable. He lead our ceremony with love and personalization. He knew us. He made us, our family and our guests comfortable. And I’ve never thought to compliment a rabbi on a ceremony, but our family and guests came up to us and to Rabbi Tom with the warmest compliments (no, really!) If we were getting married again, we would easily choose Rabbi Tom to remarry us. But if you’re only going to get married once, and care about a personal, warm, relevant Jewish guidance leading up to, and during your wedding, we couldn’t recommend Rabbi Tom Samuels any higher. Jake and Lauren, New York City Thank you so much for helping make our wedding day feel so special. We will never forget your guidance and support. Mike and Laura, Chicago, IL Rabbi Tom, Thank you so much for officiating at our wedding ceremony. We appreciate your willingness to work with us and help us plan a meaningful, sacred ceremony that we will cherish forever. Katie and Brian, Chicago, IL We cannot express how grateful we are for everything you did to make our wedding day perfect. You made everything simple, see, and fun! Meeting with you to discuss everything in advance really calmed our nerves and created more and more excitement as the day arrived. You were exceptional on the big day, and created to much happiness with your energy. Our family and friends raved about you and the way you led our beautiful ceremony. We cannot thank you enough. You will always be in our memories and hearts! Thank you! Lindsey and Aaron, Galesburg, IL Rabbi Tom, As I have now recovered from such a joyous occasion, I can formally say thank you for marrying Mark and I. We are so grateful that we connected with you and that you were able to join our families. I can't tell you how much both of our families enjoyed speaking with you and the ceremony itself, which is all we hoped for. Thank you so much for such a beautiful ceremony, the guidance beforehand, and for connecting with our families in such a genuine way. We are truly so grateful. A million thanks. Terri and Mark, Chicago, IL Rabbi Tom's patience shone through over the long period between when we first reached out to him about officiating and when he was actually called upon to help us get married (over two years!), thanks to a COVID-driven postponement of the original date. But from day 1 he was committed to helping us craft a ceremony that was special, thoughtful, and meaningful to us both, including diving into working with a Christian co-officiant to build an interfaith ceremony that equally balanced our beliefs, traditions, and perspectives. On the day-of, Tom was congenial, friendly, and excited to take part in bringing us together under the chuppah. It meant the world to us to get to start our married life knowing that we were accepted and welcomed as ourselves in a Jewish lens, even if one of us wasn't a Jew, and we have Rabbi Tom to thank for that. David & McKinley, Chicago We are thrilled that Rabbi Tom did the ceremony for our 40th anniversary! The words he wrote were beautiful and reflected exactly how we felt. He made this wonderful occasion extraordinary with his words and song. Cherisse and Jim, Indiana |