Veiling the Bride

The bedeken (Yiddish for the covering) is the veiling of the bride by the groom, performed immediately before the wedding ceremony in Ashkenazi custom. The groom, accompanied by family and guests, approaches the bride and draws the veil down over her face before the two proceed to the chuppah. The custom is commonly explained through the biblical account in Genesis of Jacob, who was deceived into marrying Leah when he had worked for Rachel because the bride was veiled; the groom's own placing of the veil is read as his confirmation that he knows whom he is marrying. A second traditional association is with Rebecca, who veiled herself on first meeting Isaac. The moment is often accompanied by a blessing over the bride echoing the words spoken to Rebecca's family. Sephardi communities generally do not have the bedeken as a distinct rite, and its details vary within Ashkenazi practice.

Scholars of Jewish custom generally regard the bedeken as a comparatively late addition to the wedding sequence, its earliest clear attestations coming from Ashkenazi communities in Central and Eastern Europe in the early modern period rather than from Talmudic sources, which describe the veiling of brides only in the older biblical narratives the custom later drew on for its rationale. In recent decades some egalitarian and non-Orthodox communities have reworked or dropped the ceremony, uneasy with its traditional framing of the groom actively confirming and, in effect, choosing the veiled bride, and have substituted a mutual unveiling or a shared moment of blessing that does not single out the bride as the one inspected.