Couple at their Peakrenewvows
NOTTINGHAM LIBERAL Synagogue members Laurence and Sarah Sugarman donned hiking boots to accompany their wedding outfits as they renewed their vows in a chupah at Jacob’s Ladder in the Peak District.
Married for 26 years, the couple, both 52, were also celebrating Mr Sugarman’s recent recovery from GuillainBarre, a syndrome which affects the nervous system and causes temporary paralysis.
They were joined by family and friends, including their three children Max, 25, Megan 23, and Mia, eight. Their rabbi, Tanya Sakhnovich, officiated.
“We carried everything to the foot of Jacob’s Ladder and then two people stayed behind to set everything up while the rest of us climbed up to the top,” Mrs Sugarman told the JC.
“Rabbi Tanya did a blessing for us at the top, which was just lovely, and we had some poems and took lots and lots of amazing photographs. Then we all climbed back down, by which time we were very hungry, so we had our picnic.”
Then came the wedding ceremony and the exchanging of rings under the chupah.
The couple met at a teens’ night at Nottingham’s Palais de Danse and married at their Nottingham shul a decade later. Mr Sugarman, a fitness instructor, said the location for their renewal of vows s y mbol i s e d t h e “challenges of life and marriage” — not least that “I almost died and was paralysed”.
During his illness, “I realised how much I loved my wife and how much my wife has added to my life. When you become older, you want to renew that love.
His wife described the day as “a happy event in a pretty miserable world at the moment”. She hoped that sharing their story would “make some people smile”.
The day was a happy event in a pretty miserable world’