Michelle Obama Secretly Helped Officiate A Jewish Wedding

Michelle Obama, wedding crasher Image by Getty Images

By Jenny Singer September 24, 2018

Hold on to your huts, friends: As Jews around the world prepared for the festival of Sukkot this weekend, two Jews got married under a shelter of peace — guided by none other than Michelle Obama.

The former first lady led a young Jewish couple in a recitation of their wedding vows in the heart of Chicago. Stephanie Moelis Rivkin and Joel Sircus were married on Saturday, September 22 on the banks of Lake Michigan, with views of the Chicago skyline, under a snow-white chuppah. And although the New York Times announcement of their wedding lists the couple’s friend Robert Dresser as the ceremony officiant with another friend, Meredith Potter, directing the vows portion, a cell-phone video of the event captures Michelle Obama in that role.

That footate, originally taken for an Instagram story by the bride’s cousin Tina Newman and obtained by TMZ, shows Obama in a floor-length, long-sleeve black evening gown, reciting a line from the couple’s wedding vows and holding up the microphone for the bride to repeat them after her. Obama, who will begin a 10-city book tour this November to promote her new memoir, “Becoming,” can be seen grinning in the video as light wind buffets the walls of the rose-accented chuppah. “I promise to stand next to and support you through all of life’s trials and triumphs,” she prompts the bride.

Rivkin and Sircus met and started dating in high school. Sircus followed Rivkin to Yale, and the couple dated on and off for 10 years. But Rivkin’s connection to the Obamas is even more long-term. Rivkin’s father, Robert S. Rivkin, is the deputy mayor of Chicago, the city the Obamas have long called home. And President Obama appointed her mother Cindy Moelis, now Executive Director of the Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation, as Director for the Presidential Commission on White House Fellows in 2009.

Congratulations to Stephanie and Joel on having the best surprise wedding officiant imaginable, for being one of the least annoying-seeming couples to ever grace the pages of the New York Times vows section, and also on your marriage.

Siman tov u’Michelle-Obama tov!

Jenny Singer is the deputy lifestyle editor for the Forward. You can reach her at singer@forward.com or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Jenny Singer is a freelance writer with pieces in Vox, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Teen Vogue, and more. She was previously a staff writer at Glamour and the Forward, and she’s currently getting an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO