New tradition. Not necessarily an oxymoron, if you’re a modern bride and groom reviving a popular Old Country custom from 400 years ago: the ceremonial wedding ring.
Berkeley artist Esther Davies has been crafting ceremonial wedding rings for three years. After noticing them in museums and in coffee-table books about Jewish ritual art, she became inspired to create her own. So far, Davies has made about 20 rings of fine silver, sterling silver and gold. Each ring is unique, standing about two inches high and comprising a broad embossed wedding band topped with a miniature building.
Davies said that the ceremonial wedding ring was popular throughout small European Jewish communities in the 16th and 17th centuries. The rings were designed to be worn only for the duration of the betrothal ceremony, and because they were so extravagantly crafted, few families could afford their own.
Consequently, the community would own one outlandish ring for everyone’s ceremony, Davies said.
The building atop the ring of old represented different things to different people: It could signify the ancient Temple, the local synagogue or the new home of the bride and groom. Davies’ sleek and geometric little replicas are similarly open to interpretation and feature such moving parts as tiny hinged doors that unlatch and swing open, and rooftop flags that spin like weather vanes. Very small jewels and ornamental gingerbread adorn some of the houses, and some of the slanted roofs bear a mem on one side and a tav on the other, the Hebrew initials of “mazel tov.” A ring takes her four or five days to complete, Davies said.
Because there aren’t many concentrated, tight-knit Jewish communities nowadays, she said, people buy ceremonial rings to keep for marriages within their families instead.
One man bought a ring as a family treasure to start a tradition. The family will engrave the names and dates of whoever marries, and then give it back to the family keeper, she said.
Though Davies was always artistic, she hadn’t seriously considered an art career until she moved to California from New York in the 1960s. A few years later, over lunch, a poet friend urged her at age 49 to finally follow her dream and enroll at the California College of Arts.
But first, she had to obtain a student loan, which was tough considering her age. Davies convinced the bank’s loan officer to bend the rules, however. The bank loaned her the first semester’s tuition. Davies continued through four years of undergraduate school, garnering national defense loans, grants, and anything going, she said. Then she was awarded a fellowship for two years of graduate school, and she received her master’s in fine arts in 1977.
Davies studied painting, sculpture, printmaking and metalworking and began specializing in fused enamel on metal. For several years after graduating, she sold large-scale wall hangings to architects and designers; then, in the 1980s, she switched to creating jewelry and developed an ongoing interest in Jewish themes.
“My favorite stories from the Bible crop up in my work, particularly Jacob’s Ladder and David,” she said.
Besides her ceremonial wedding rings, Davies’ ritual art includes delicate sterling silver mezuzot with architectural themes, dreidels and spice boxes with tiny moving parts.
The price of the wedding rings ranges from approximately $250 to $1200. Davies recently sold two rings — and other items — at the American Craft Council Craft Show in San Francisco, and she will attend three more craft shows before the end of the year in New York, Washington D.C., and Florida. She also sells her pieces from her studio in Berkeley. (She can be reached at (510) 848-6833.)
Davies ensures that her rings will be well protected and appropriately displayed when they leave her custody. Centered in an acrylic display box, each ring rests on a sleek metal stand that is a piece of art in its own right. A mini-chuppah of silver and gold surrounds the ring.
Davies envisions the future of the ceremonial wedding rings she sends off to their new families:
“I prefer ‘keeper’ to ‘owner,'” she said. “The elder is the keeper. Whoever marries, wears it, then it goes back to the keeper.
“Anyway, that’s my idea of it.”