DescriptionEarliest Known New Zealand Ketubah or Yibbum (wedding contract).jpg
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."
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