Here come the brides — straight down Claremont Avenue to Afikomen in Berkeley.
The 10-year-old Judaica shop has added another feature to the many services that have made it a fixture on the Bay Area scene. Instead of being crowded into a back corner of the main store, all wedding materials have been moved to an adjacent annex of their own. Afikomen’s Wedding Store opened around the corner on Prince Street in August. At the moment, the new site must be entered through the main store, but with success that may change.
“For a long time we’ve wanted to have an expanded wedding business and create an environment that we just didn’t have room for,” said owner Jerry Derblich. “Then I found out the people in the shop around the corner were leaving and I said, ‘OK, let’s grab it.'”
Not only did Derblich grab it but he hired a full-time director to staff the new venture. But don’t look to her to arrange the whole wedding. At least not yet.
“We’re not going to be a wedding planner per se,” Derblich said. “Our plan at this point in time is to be a resource guide. We won’t do any hiring but, instead of running around to six or seven places to hear different bands, you can check out their CDs here. We’ll have lists of hotels that provide kosher food, caterers’ menus and all that — as well as renting chuppot, selling ketubot as we do now.
“Right now, people come to us a month or two before the wedding. Our goal is for them to come nine months or a year in advance.”
The store, now furnished simply with a sofa, coffee table, chairs and cases that hold wedding-related merchandise and books, will be augmented after the first of the year by a Web site, “something like afikomenwedding.com,” he said. “Right now you can go to a site for, say, ketubot or Jewish music, but this will be comprehensive, just like the store. As far as I know, there may not be anything like this except perhaps in New York.”
How will Derblich make money off the new venture? He is less certain about that aspect. “Maybe a referral fee? Maybe a fee to be listed with us? Who knows? It may not work at all.
“If I had to rely on just business from Berkeley, we wouldn’t make it,” he added. “But people come to us from all over — Marin, San Francisco, Concord, even Fresno. We’re a regional store.”
For now, the shelves hold a selection of everything for the Jewish bride and groom (or those who wish to give them a gift) from artwork and books to benschers (booklets for grace and songs after meals) and invitations. The store also sells items from kippot to ketubot to Kiddush cups, as well as delicately engraved crystal candlesticks. There even is a special wedding glass in a silken pouch that you can break at the end of the ceremony and then have the shards set into a mezuzah, Kiddush cup or — would you believe — a kaleidoscope.
What’s left to say but “mazel tov”?