Planning a Wedding with 20,000 Guests

If you are a leader of one of the largest Chassidic group in the world and your daughter is planning a wedding, you have to think big...No bigger than that. No, really BIG.

First you'll need to find a venue that would accommodate an unpredictable amount of people that belong to your Chassidic group, lets say 10,000 to 20,000 people that would love to share the wedding joy of their beloved Rebbe. In addition to the Bobover Chassidic community of Boro Park, thousands from Antwerp, Lakewood, London, Monsey, Montreal, Toronto, Williamsburg, and elsewhere will be in attendance. And of course, you can expect another couple of thousand people who are likely to drop by just to see what a twenty thousand people wedding looks like.

The Venue

Floyd Bennett Field, the no-longer-in-use airfield adjacent to the Marine Parkway Bridge in South Brooklyn was the venue of choice for this couple. The airfield’s two gargantuan cement runways, each nearly one-mile long, were the largest in the world when built in 1929. The airfield and its hangars are likely the largest usable open spaces, both indoors and out, in New York City today.

When your wedding is of such proportions, it is, for all intents and purposes, a concert. (And if you don't do it right, it may very well turn into a cirus, too.) It is not exactly clear, though, who the audience is. Are they the friends and family, are they the guests (invited and the uninvited). Shall you want to find out, browse the videos for this wedding on YouTube.com and you'll see that the roles change and everyone is entertained at some point and time.




Phototgrapher

For this event, which by the way, took place on May 27, 2007, not one, not two, not even three photo crews were commissioned to photograph the happenings of the day. No, it took five photography teams to document this affair. Hirsh Rosner Studio of Boro Park was the leader of photography pack, who, by the way, has plenty of such weddings in his porfolio.

Planning


On the bright side, when you are a leader of a huge Chassidic group there are plenty of helpers (and those helpers have more helpers...) to take care of every single detail of the event planning - no wedding planner necessary.