Hard Times on the Wedding Circuit : Traditions: A Hasidic rabbi puts a ceiling on costs of the celebrations. Musicians say they are being hurt by the mandated cutbacks.

Oy vey, the fiddler on the roof is being replaced by a synthesizer.

A powerful Hasidic rabbi has ordered severe cuts in the costs of traditional orthodox Jewish weddings, so severe that professional musicians are complaining they are being replaced by machines.

An edict, or tekonos, issued by Moses Teitlbaum, the grand rabbi of the Satmar sect in Brooklyn, mandates the hiring of “one-man bands” and forbids the use of traditional four-man bands.

The Satmars are the largest of the sects that comprise the Hasidic Jewish movement.

“We’ve seen a lot of musicians have their work cut back severely,” says Steve Levine, a union representative for Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians.

Levine estimates that 150 of the local’s 15,000 members work in the Hasidic field.

“My work is down,” says Pete Sokolow, a keyboard player. “There’s no future in live music. The machines are doing everything.”

The rabbi also ordered other restrictions on wedding expenditures: serving only cake and liquor at engagement parties; inviting fewer people for the main meal, which is to consist of fewer courses; serving only fruit and cake for dessert and banning videotaping.

The Satmars have weddings that are usually three times the size of secular Jewish weddings. They can cost $20,000 or more because, in addition to the catered affair, the newlyweds are provided with enough money to pay rent for the first year of their marriage as well as funds to furnish their home.

Since a large percentage of Satmar couples are poor, the wealthier members of the community subsidize their weddings. The Hasidic sect has an egalitarian tradition of providing the poor with as lavish a wedding as the affluent.

With large families, the Satmars are finding that financing weddings has become a major expense, especially in times of a recession.

“The concept of a Jewish wedding is to make people joyful, and this can be accomplished with a minimum amount of money,” says Rabbi Hertz Frankel, a Satmar spokesman.

“Somebody said, ‘Enough is enough.’ People should not have to go bankrupt marrying off their children.”

Over the years, other Hasidic groups have adopted austerity measures for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

The musicians’ union has tried unsuccessfully to meet Satmar officials to discuss the situation, according to Levine.

“There’s nothing to meet with them about,” Frankel says. “This is not against them. It has to do with a theological concept. You can’t help it that some people are being hurt by this. Other people in the community are being helped by it.”

Although the rabbi was referring to Satmars who are spending far less than they once did on weddings, it turns out that the one-man bands are also benefitting from the rabbi’s decree.

The one-man bands, which started catching on in the last few years, employ synthesizers with built-in drum machines that give them the ability to make horn and woodwind sounds as well as those of the piano and organ.

The one-man bands cost between $85 and $100 an hour, compared to the union scale of between $145 and $180 per man for four hours.

Abe Goldenthal, the leader of the Kol Rina Orchestra, recently lost his bid to play a wedding. The family decided to spend $600 for a one-man band that played for six hours rather than paying Goldenthal and his three-piece band $700 for four hours.

Goldenthal says he can understand the need to limit the total cost for music but wishes the rabbi wouldn’t ban outright the use of more than one musician.

After playing a wedding for members of another Hasidic sect, Goldenthal says he was told by the bride’s parents: “We’ll never forget how good the music was.”