He Didn't Know It Was an Audition. But He Got the Husband Role.

New York Times

18-07-2025

For most of her adult life, Aleksandra Shira Dubov said had been 'addicted' to unrequited love. So in 2019, when she found herself stargazing in the Mojave Desert near Panamint Valley, Calif., with Daniel Mitchell Berchenko, and he asked if he could kiss her — her response startled both of them.
'What kind of kiss?' she asked. 'Are you wanting to hook up or are you auditioning to be my husband?'
While it wasn't the former, he couldn't say with certainty in that moment that it was the latter, either. There was no kiss that night.
The two initially met at a festival called 'Passover in the Desert' in 2015, hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area organization, Wilderness Torah, which seeks to reinvigorate earth-based Judaism.
But their love story would only begin when they were preparing for the same festival four years later, in 2019, when they were both on the planning team. More than once, a logistical phone call turned into a meandering conversation about their goals and dreams.
Though seven additional people were working together on that team, Mr. Berchenko, who goes by Daniyel and uses Emmanuel as his middle name, said, 'Being on a team with Aleksandra felt so natural and good. We just felt in flow together.'
In 2018, Mr. Berchenko had recently returned from spending two years on an ancestral pilgrimage to Eastern Europe (his parents immigrated to the United States from Odessa, the Ukrainian city where Ms. Dubov's great-grandparents were also from). He returned feeling ready to meet his life partner.
On a hike about a month later in Oakland, Calif., where both were living, their conversation veered from their mutual love of the medicinal herb mugwort to the sudden death of Ms. Dubov's father, Stephen Dubov, at age 55, when she was 21. He was a cantor.
'His ability to hold my emotions and grief and whatever was coming up, I thought to myself, 'This feels like home,'' Ms. Dubov said. When he asked if he could kiss her at the end of the hike, this time, she said, 'Of course.'
Ms. Dubov, 40, is a cantorial student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York and will be starting as a student cantor at Manhattan's Village Temple this fall. She graduated from Indiana University with a bachelor's degree in voice and theater.
Mr. Berchenko, 43, is a rabbinical student in the Aleph ordination program of the Jewish Renewal movement. He is also the B'nai mitzvah program specialist at Larchmont Temple in Larchmont, N.Y., where the couple now live. He has a bachelor's degree in environmental science and policy from the University of Maryland, College Park.
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The couple began to explore a romantic relationship after the kiss, but nothing about their journey to love was linear. They took a break in December 2019. Then the pandemic hit, and he was living in Jerusalem; she was in California. By August 2020, Mr. Berchenko decided to explore a connection with someone else, but ultimately, realized it didn't compare to what he had with Ms. Dubov.
By that October, they had found their way back to each other, becoming a pandemic pod, and then, living together in Jerusalem while she was in her first year of cantorial school, and he studied at Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies to prepare for rabbinical school.
In March 2024, Mr. Berchenko accompanied Ms. Dubov to Oaxaca, Mexico, for her brother's wedding, which she was officiating. While he hadn't planned on proposing yet, he found the wedding energy contagious. With a moonstone ring from a street vendor, he proposed on an overlook, two days after her brother's wedding, with many of Ms. Dubov's family members still present.
On July 6, they were married at Levity Mountain, an organic farm in Manchester, Vt., before 120 guests. Rabbi Zelig Golden, an independent rabbi based in Sonoma County, Calif., who is a founder of Wilderness Torah, officiated. Throughout the weekend, the couple hosted a series of events that they called their 'Ancient Future Love Ritual,' which kicked off with a Shabbat dinner on the night of July 4.
The ceremony, where guests sat on blankets, chairs, or stood around their huppah, featured a ritual where they were asked to face different directions, which represented the four cardinal directions and had a different symbolic meaning attached to it.
While reciting his vows, Mr. Berchenko told Ms. Dubov, 'I love the vessel that you are for the divine goddess energy that flows through you.' In her vows, Ms. Dubov went back to that night in the desert in 2019, when she first wondered about his intentions. She told Mr. Berchenko: 'After a long and arduous six-year audition process, I'm really happy to tell you that you got the part.'