Couples put their faith in interfaith

Gabrielle Malouf married Zach Slavis on a warm October day, her stepfather and father having walked her down the aisle.

She glided in her beaded Essense of Australia dress with flowing train to her waiting husband-to-be at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa.

It might have looked like a typical wedding in Orange County, but it was anything but.

Slavis is Jewish. Malouf is Christian Arab, and so is her father. Her stepfather is Jewish.

The two men of different faiths gave their daughter away before two men of different faiths — a priest and a rabbi — who performed the wedding together, allowing the couple to have the religious ceremony they had so badly sought and almost didn’t have — one that blended their lives in a celebration of love, unity and interfaith potential.

“It took 50 minutes to do the Christian component and the Jewish component ... they didn’t want to step on each other’s toes,” said Malouf, now Gabrielle Slavis, who is known as Ellie.

But the success of the ceremony belies the difficulty in finding someone to officiate. The couple contacted rabbis who, one after another, refused to participate in an interfaith ceremony. The San Clemente couple were faced with the not-so-desirable option of getting married without religion being a core element of the day.

“Many people at first were saying nope, can’t do it, can’t do it,” said Ellie, 25. “Unless we went completely Reform, we might just have to have a non-religious wedding, but that is not what I wanted.”

Finally, her wedding planner found a rabbi who performed interfaith ceremonies.

But the path remains pockmarked for anyone trying to cross traditional religious bounds.

Gabrielle “Ellie” and Zach Slavis of San Clemente were married this month in Huntington Beach by Rabbi Barry Tuchman of Irvine and Bishop Brian P. Delvaux.

(Frank Salas Photography / Daily Pilot)

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“An interfaith rabbi is one who understands there is a community of people being rejected by the traditional church and synagogue,” said Irvine Rabbi Barry Tuchman, who along with Bishop Brian P. Delvaux married the Slavises.

Delvaux oversees the clergy and pastoral ministry of Good Shepherd Church in Lakewood.

While many rabbis see interfaith relationships as threatening to Judaism, Tuchman views them as just the opposite: a means of protecting the religion.

“If a rabbi says, no, I won’t marry you, they may fall through the cracks and leave Judaism,” he said.

Tuchman waxes philosophical on the subject of religion.

“Love brought the two of you together,” he said, speaking of any interfaith match. “Life brought you together. God brought you together. All three of those things are the same. When we take a breath, that breath is life. Breath is God. We are not separated by the shell of our bodies. It’s all connection.

“God isn’t Jewish. God isn’t Buddhist. God simply is. So the religion we slip into, it’s not really essential. People can put any number of cloaks on that make them spiritual. When you start living in that life, in the breath, that is your reward.”

The Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study this year found that almost 4 in 10 Americans (39%) who have married since 2010 have a spouse who is of a different religion. By contrast, only 19% of those who wed before 1960 reported being in a religious intermarriage.

Furthermore, it says that Jews (65%) and mainline Protestants (59%) are more likely than U.S. Hindus, Mormons and Muslims to marry outside of their religions.

According to an article last year in the Christian Science Monitor, Jewish-Christian groups are most common in the U.S., though there are small groups or Web forums that focus on Muslim-Christian, Jewish-Hindu and other mixed marriages.

Rabbi Larry Seidman, who is part of the Catholic-Jewish dialogue in Orange County, a group of religious people who meet monthly at Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, guesses that half the Jewish families in Orange County are intermarried.

Seidman is not affiliated with a synagogue and notes that he is far from alone in that regard. Congregations can have boards of directors and things can get “very political and very sensitive, so rabbis are declining congregational affiliation.”

“Many rabbis are finding another way of being a rabbi,” he said.

Also furthering this independence movement, which Seidman describes as a fairly new phenomemon, is the fact that there are more rabbis than synagogues. Orange County, he said, is home to maybe 15 Jewish congregations and 30 rabbis.

So these rabbis are maintaining their livelihoods amid this shift in attitude.

“Maybe 10 years ago it was relatively rare to find a rabbi willing to do interfaith,” said Seidman. “Much of the community kind of frowned on it. It was perceived as a threat to Judaism. More recently many are coming to see that the reverse is true.”

He said because Jews make up a certain percentage of the population, a mingling of the faiths in matters of romance is almost impossible to avoid.

“So I disown you? Or do I say Judaism is the way to go? Let me explain it to you, and why not join the club,” Seidman said. “We should be reaching out, not shutting people out.”

But whether more people are brought into the fold or not, it seems that the welcome mat is out. Orange County-based Seidman, who performs interfaith ceremonies and has a website called rationalrabbi.com, recalls two people, neither of whom was Jewish, who wanted the rabbi to marry them.

“They said we have seen your website, and I did a wedding that had the structure of a Jewish wedding,” he said. “I sometimes think of Judiasm as 3,000 years of applied psychology: what meets your needs, and we can modify it.”

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To Lisa Cohen of Orange, “People need clergy that are open and progressive .... Our culture is very fluid, and I think you need fluid clergy to deal with that.”

Cohen, whose mother was Episcopalian and father was Jewish, married a Jewish man. Rabbi Marc Rubenstein, who lives in Temecula but performs ceremonies regularly in Orange County, and is rabbi emeritus of Temple Isaiah in Newport Beach, performed the ceremony.

“Rabbi Marc is very kind and open-minded and progressive,” she said. “I was like this hippy girl, half breed — half Jewish, half Episcopalian. My husband wanted a traditional Jewish wedding.”

Rubenstein is known as the rabbi to the stars and the traveling rabbi. He can be seen on his website, interfaithrabbicalifornia.com, in photos taken with actresses Diane Keaton and Juliette Lewis.

Rabbi Marc Rubenstein with Ione Skye.

(Handout / Daily Pilot)

His hatchback is filled with the tools of his trade, including a suit in case he is needed for a funeral. On a recent Monday, he said he hadn’t been to his home in Temecula since the previous Friday.

He’ll go nearly anywhere to perform a ceremony — marriage, funeral, bar mitzvah — and accommodate the wishes of the people involved to the best of his ability. He has done weddings in a hot air balloon and on mountains. He’s traveled to Peru, Anchorage, Alaska, and elsewhere to tend to “Jewish orphans,” as he calls people who feel like religious outcasts.

“I feel that I’m the fortunate one,” he said.

Tuchman said he has flown to Japan, Guatemala, Mexico and Hawaii, “because I didn’t have a congregation to tie me down.”

At 67, he doesn’t like traveling out of state anymore.

Traveling San Diego Rabbi Ian Adler said he used to put 40,000 miles on his car in a year.

“Marc is probably 50,000 a year,” he said of his itinerant friend Rubenstein.

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The recent Pew research shows that not only are more Americans marrying people of other religions, but a quickly growing number are keeping their separate faiths rather than converting.

Ellie, a nurse at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, and Zach Slavis, 28, an electrical engineer with Cadence Design Systems in Irvine, respect each of their faith-based traditions in a sort of blended family.

Even their wedding reception exemplified this attitude, with the garter retrieval — not a Judaic thing to do — joining the hora and the smashing of the glass.

And the couple say things won’t change with the eventual addition of children.

They plan to keep track of Rabbi Tuchman and Bishop Delvaux, because there are certain to be baptisms and bar mitzvahs.

“I would like them to have that experience,” Ellie said of her future children, adding that it would be hard to find a traditional priest and rabbi willing to serve these nontraditional needs.