Wedding Bells Ring For Hillel Leader Michael Simon

When Claire Sufrin opened the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times in March to search for familiar faces in the wedding announcements, she was surprised to see her own face within the pages. Her then-boyfriend Michael Simon had pasted a wedding announcement he had written in her copy as a proposal.

This weekend, the Jewish community at Harvard celebrated the union of Sufrin and Simon, the associate director of Hillel.

The two were married on Sunday at Temple Emanuel in Newton Center, Mass. The four-day, traditional Jewish wedding ceremony included ritual bathing, recitations of the Torah, and prayer services led by family and friends, rather than religious officials.

“It was much more than a wedding,” said Gabrielle Soble, Harvard’s director of student activities. “It was amazing because it was completely participatory.”

The pair met in the summer of 2006. Simon was in Jerusalem preparing a 3-week-long trip to Israel for Harvard and Yale students (the program was ultimately cancelled due to violence between Israel and Lebanon). Sufrin was in Jerusalem conducting research for her doctoral degree, which she was pursuing at Stanford.

They met one evening at Friday night services and spent the weekend getting to know each other. But three days later, Sufrin had to return to California, marking the beginning of a long-distance relationship that lasted eleven months.

The following summer, Sufrin moved to Boston, where she now teaches at Northeastern University. Several months later, Simon proposed at Simon’s Cafe near Porter Square.

“Being with Claire makes me aspire to be the best person that I can be,” said Simon yesterday, at a brunch held at Hillel for the couple.

The two cited a love for learning and a commitment to tikkun olam—a Hebrew phrase meaning “repairing of the world”—as shared values that helped bring them together.

“I had reached the point in my life where I knew I was content,” Sufrin said. “Falling in love with Michael made me realize there was more beyond that.