Sofia Richie, Lionel Richie’s daughter, marries Jewish music executive after converting to Judaism
A British rabbi performed the wedding in the south of France
Sofia Richie and Elliot Grainge at an Oscars viewing party in West Hollywood, Calif., March 27, 2022. (Amy Sussman/Getty Images for Elton John AIDS Foundation)
(JTA) — Sofia Richie, a model and the daughter of musician Lionel Richie, married Jewish music executive Elliot Grainge on Saturday, less than a month after she said she completed her conversion to Judaism.
Earlier this month, Richie had posted on Instagram that Nathan Lam, a prominent Los Angeles cantor, had been “helping me along this journey of converting to Judaism.”
Pronouncing her conversion complete on April 3, she posted on Instagram, “It has been one of the greatest experiences of my life.”
Richie, 24, and Grainge, 29, tied the knot at a hotel in Antibes, France, where they were married by Rabbi Thomas Solomon, a British rabbi, according to a report in Vogue magazine. They also held a private ceremony to sign the ketubah, the Jewish wedding contract.
In photos, the couple can be seen standing with their parents under a lush chuppah, with Grainge wearing a white kippah and tallit. “It was very important to Elliot’s family and to me, now that I’ve converted, that it be a traditional Jewish ceremony,” Richie told Vogue.
The couple has been together since 2021. Grainge, who grew up in England and runs an independent rap and pop music label, is the son of Lucian Grainge, the CEO of Universal Music Group, one of the world’s biggest music companies, and a self-proclaimed “nice Jewish boy.”
Elliot Grainge told JewishBoston.com in 2013 that Take That, a British pop group that had several chart-topping hits in the 1990s and 2000s, performed at his bar mitzvah.
Richie, whose adoptive sister Nicole is a celebrity in her own right as a TV personality, grew up attending the Oaks Christian School in Los Angeles. Her father Lionel, 73, became one of the best-selling pop artists of all time through a career starting in the 1970s as a member of The Commodores.
Lam, formerly a celebrity voice coach and a senior cantor at the city’s Stephen Wise Temple — a Reform congregation that is one of Southern California’s largest — has been accused of carrying on a series of inappropriate sexual relationships with congregants and mentees. Since last year he has been a cantor at the Temple of the Arts in Beverly Hills, a Reform congregation that operates in a theater owned by billionaire and prominent Democratic donor Haim Saban.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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