37 Spring 2026 A Stille Chuppe In practice, many Holocaust survivors who wanted to marry had great difficulty meeting the evidentiary demands of the local pastors and therefore could not marry according to Swedish law – whether in a civil ceremony at the Town Hall or in a religious ceremony conducted by an accredited rabbi. When all attempts to convince pastoral authorities to issue a hinderlöshetsintyg had been exhausted, survivors who wished to marry faced a stark choice: remain unmarried indefinitely or proceed with a religious ceremony that would have no legal recognition in Sweden. For many survivors, the need to establish a family and return to some semblance of everyday life after their traumatic experiences took precedence over legal formalities. Thus, dozens of Jewish marriages took place in Sweden after the war without the sanction of Swedish civil authorities, and in rare instances, may have been conducted with minimal rabbinic oversight, though documentation of such cases has not survived. Rabbi A.I. Jacobson conducted some of these wedding ceremonies, and possibly Rabbi Zuber as well, before he emigrated to the United States in 1947. The ceremonies followed complete Orthodox Jewish procedures, including the presence of the required witnesses, and were conducted as a proper chupa v’kiddushin (Jewish wedding ceremony). However, they took place mainly in smaller provincial cities, such as Västerås, Eskilstuna, Köping, Jönköping, Örebro, and Växjö, likely in private homes or other discreet venues, rather than in official community settings or government-managed rehabilitation camps. To avoid drawing attention to these extralegal arrangements, the weddings were kept discreet and not publicized. A refugee wedding thus conducted soon acquired the nickname “a stille chuppe” (a quiet wedding in Yiddish). The term appears to have come into use around 1947, applied by observers rather than by the couples themselves. Correspondence between Rabbi Hermann Löb in Göteborg and Rabbi Jacobson, as well as photographic evidence from at least one wedding in Örebro, indicate that such ceremonies did indeed take place, though no comprehensive records of their number have survived. In practice, these wedding ceremonies circumvented both the pastors of the Lutheran Swedish state church and the official Jewish communities, which in normal circumstances operated in harmonious cooperation to administer family law for the Jewish minority. The established leadership almost certainly knew that these ceremonies were occurring and likely disapproved; yet it appears they maintained a stance of silent acceptance rather than confrontation. Swedish civil authorities either remained unaware or chose not to intervene. When rabbis performed these ceremonies, the decision to circumvent civil law posed an ethical dilemma. The justification appears to have rested on prioritizing the survivors’ desperate need to rebuild their lives – in essence, choosing life over the alternative of remaining in legal and emotional limbo. Rabbi Jacobson, motivated by profound human concern for the Holocaust survivors’ welfare, saw these marriages as essential to their rehabilitation. The consequences of this pragmatic solution soon became apparent. Not legalizing their marriages according to Swedish law was only one aspect of the status of these newly formed families. While informal marital relationships were not unusual in Sweden, the situation became more complicated within a year, when children were born. The newborns had to be registered with the authorities at the pastoral bureaus. Due to the parents’ unregistered marital status, the pastors had no alternative but to register the children as born out of wedlock according to local law – a designation that carried significant social stigma and deeply troubled the couples and their advocates within the Jewish community. Rabbi A.I. Jacobson was gravely concerned about this situation and how these Jewish couples and children would have to face society. He was worried about both the way they were regarded by the pastors who handled their registration at birth and their social stigma in the surrounding community. In a 1951 article in a periodical published by the Swedish section of the World Jewish Congress, written on the occasion of his 60th birthday, Rabbi Jacobson reflected on the status of these children: A weighty argument in my negotiations with the authorities on this question was that among us Jews, illegitimate children were very rare before the survivors arrived in Sweden. 24. Abraham Israel Jacobson, supra note 17, at 10-11 [translated from Swedish by the authors].
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