Weddings, Memorials and Rising Prices: Queens Writer Urges Bukharian Families to Cut Costs

Queens writer Rafael Normatov is pressing Bukharian families to rethink what weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs and memorial meals cost, arguing in an Oct. 1, 2026 column in The Bukharian Times that rising prices have made the issue urgent.

The column follows his Sept. 24 piece on banquet culture. He wrote that it drew many calls and online comments, and that the paper asked him to continue the discussion.

Normatov said abandoning the community’s customs is not an option. “We need to hold weddings for our children and grandchildren. We must celebrate bar and bat mitzvahs,” he wrote. The question is how. A wedding “should not turn into a financial test for the family that invites the guests,” he wrote, and he has seen guests leave large, expensive weddings complaining about the spending. “I am not the first to write about this,” he added, “but now, when prices for everything have risen seriously, this question takes on new urgency.”

Memory without the banquet

On memorial gatherings, Normatov urged separating religious tradition from the size of the meal. In his own family, he wrote, relatives gather at home, share stories and photographs, and give in the departed’s memory: donations to a synagogue, help for sick children, gifts to charities and support for university students. For bar and bat mitzvahs, he suggested keeping the ritual in the synagogue and holding a celebration mainly for the child and friends.

He pointed to signs that change is under way. A council of rabbis, he wrote, proposed in The Bukharian Times that everyone except the closest relatives limit themselves to $200. Some wealthy families, he added, have stopped handing out “packages” at memorials and, at their own weddings, have asked guests to leave no more than $100, for charity in the name of the bride and groom.

“Traditions do not exist so that our children repeat everything after us down to the last detail and fall into debt bondage after weddings,” Normatov wrote. Families, he argued, are learning to separate “tradition from excess, memory from showy feasting, joy from financial competition.”

This report was translated from Russian by Bukharian Jewish Post from columns published in The Bukharian Times.

Sources: The Bukharian Times (Normatov, Oct. 1); The Bukharian Times (Normatov, Sept. 24).