Two shows currently at the Jewish Museum examine the traditional Jewish wedding, one from a social-historical perspective focusing on its unique manifestation in Central Europe, and the other as a critical feminist response.

Mazel Tov is the Hebrew phrase for "congratulations," as well as the title of a historical exhibition in the Robert Guttmann Gallery that examines the Jewish religious wedding ceremony through photographs, garments, contracts, rings, glasses and many other items used in the wedding ritual, particularly by Jews from Central and Eastern Europe.

The Ashkenazim, or Central European Jews, maintained rites and rituals distinct from those of the other major Jewish group, Sephardim, who are mainly from Spain and the Mediterranean region. The two groups had distinct languages, and though they coexisted in many areas of Europe, it was usually in separate communities with their own synagogues and schools. The liturgies and religious ceremonies of Jews in Bohemia and Moravia were predominantly in the tradition of the Ashkenazim.

Among the exhibit's most interesting artifacts from the 19th century are a chuppah (a traditional Jewish wedding canopy), wedding hats, veils, face covers, chalices, plates for breaking during the ceremony and wedding gifts such as Shabbat candelabra, prayer books and pewter plates. There are also wedding rings dating back to the 14th century.

The most fascinating objects in this exhibit are leather shoes, with a characteristic three loops and a long strap, related to the levirate custom, a stipulation in the traditional Jewish wedding contract requiring that a man's widow marry his surviving brother. This custom was based on Jewish marital law (the Deuteronomy code), which also provides a ritual to be followed in the event that the brother-in-law does not want to marry his sibling's widow.

In such a case, the elders would hold the ceremony of halizah (Hebrew for "removing the shoe"), which releases the woman and the man from the levirate bond. In this ritual, the widow kneels to the ground to loosen the shoe from the brother-in-law, then spits before him and makes a speech according to scripture. The shoe's removal in the presence of the elders symbolizes the dissolution of the wedding contract.

It is Jewish traditions such as the levirate bond that emboldened Canadian performance artist Melissa Shiff to rebel. Her large-screen video projection Reframing Ritual: Postmodern Jewish Wedding is a bold gesture, especially in its placement at the altar of the Spanish Synagogue, one of the most heavily visited tourist sites in Prague.

In Toronto in 2003, Shiff staged her own wedding to Louis Kaplan as a performance piece, both honoring and rebuking elements of traditional Jewish wedding ritual.

She incorporated digital and electronic visual media in her ceremony rather than just using them as tools to document the event. The chuppah, for example, was tilted to serve as a screen, and a stream of images — old footage of Jewish weddings, or vintage photographs of the couple's parents — were projected above the couple throughout the ceremony.

With a hip-hop klezmer band serving up the soundtrack, the atmosphere of the Shiff–Kaplan wedding is a foot-tapping, celebratory affair, yet there is also a startling and somber beauty to some of the scenes. During the bride and groom's procession, as they walk down the aisle toward the altar, text from the Torah and the Bible is projected onto their bodies. In the darkened room, with a sole spotlight on the bride's veil, she becomes a glowing white spirit wrapped in floating, mystical text.

Shiff's redressing of text from the Torah is perhaps the strongest segment of this performance. According to a passage in Deuteronomy, if a groom discovers that his bride is not a virgin, "then they shall lead out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die." For Shiff's wedding, this verdict is read out in its entirety, then rearranged so as to delete certain words unacceptable to modern women and society. Then the words are screened back onto the chuppah in a new, recombined order, creating Dadaist poetry.