The Jewish wartime wedding in Israel that defied Hamas terrorism

On Oct. 4, New Yorkers Jonathan Bichoupan and Channi Greenwall touched down in Jerusalem roughly one week before 200 guests were scheduled to join them from the United States.

Three days after their arrival, the Palestinian terror group Hamas launched the deadliest attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, kidnapping, raping, and killing over 1,400 Israelis. While these horrifying and unprecedented course of events, which culminated in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring war, were enough to throw a wrench into the marriage plans of Jonathan, 33, and Channi, 26, they simply weren’t enough to call off a wedding.

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In interviews with the Washington Examiner, the couple described how it was important as practicing Jews that they still tie the knot in Israel, which continues to retaliate against Gaza with force following the unexpected Oct. 7 attack. At least 33 Americans have died in connection to the conflict. Hamas alleges over 9,000 Palestinians have been killed, though national security experts and the U.S. government continue to scrutinize data coming from its health ministry as unreliable.

‘Jewish people at their best’

“It wasn’t what we planned,” Channi, founder and CEO of the technology company Olympix, said. “But given the situation, it was more than we ever could have imagined in a time of such uncertainty.”

“It felt like the Jewish people at their best,” Jonathan, a Great Neck, New York, native who works in investment sales, said. “Everyone came together in the face of adversity. While people try to kill and terrorize us, we’re building a Jewish family and celebrating life.”

Provided by Jonathan Bichoupan

Channi and Jonathan had originally planned to work remotely from Jerusalem until their Oct. 15 wedding date. All of that changed on the morning of Oct. 7, when the pair awoke to the blaring sound of rocket sirens and phones buzzing with notifications. “We started reading about all the devastation of what’s going on and how there are terrorists running around Israel kidnapping and murdering people,” Jonathan recounted.

They called Channi’s sister in Tel Aviv, who was in a bomb shelter, and also watched as a young man in their building said goodbye to his mother to go to war. The streets of Jerusalem were empty, though southern Israel was where the action was primarily unfolding. There, festivalgoers at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering, including 29-year-old Maya Izoutcheev, were running for their lives from Hamas. An estimated 260 died. In nearby kibbutzim, men, women, children, and the elderly were butchered in their beds.

Throughout the day, Channi and Jonathan would go into their own bomb shelter while beginning to understand there was no way 200 people were going to be able to fly into a country at war. They spent a portion of the day getting to know an Australian family who would later be in attendance at their Israeli wedding.

Jonathan phoned his rabbi. “The last thing you’re going to do is postpone a wedding, no matter what,” the man told Jonathan, whose family was urging him to come home.

Channi recounted that Jonathan looked at her and essentially said, “It’s disrespectful to our country. This is what the soldiers are fighting for. So people can get married here. So people can live here and so Jews can enjoy this land. Mothers are sending their sons to the front lines. It’s a pretty weak move to just get on a flight and not get married here.”

Channi told the Washington Examiner, “I don’t know how to explain it. It felt like we would be running away when everyone else was standing ground. Like almost betraying Israel.”

‘The people of Israel live’

So it was agreed: They would stay. Sure, they wouldn’t have the wedding they imagined just days earlier, or ever imagined in a million years, but they’d have one, and they’d get married, and that was what was important.

Oct. 15 was no more.

They moved their wedding to Oct. 10.

In a short time, the couple coordinated with a rabbi on logistics and found a photographer after making what seemed like hundreds of calls. They planned to be married at the Western Wall, also known as the Kotel, the holiest site for the Jewish people.

Jonathan and Channi rode on a bus with around 15 or 20 people, a collection of friends already in Israel who planned to be at the original wedding five days later. One attendee’s nephew had escaped the Oct. 7 festival days earlier. The rabbi told his students to come to the wedding.

When they arrived at the Kotel, what started out as a small group soon became almost 300 strangers.

It was three or four hours of dancing and singing, Israeli men and women, gender-segregated and joined by a small cohort of American Jews chanting, “The people of Israel live” over and over.

That same day, the New York Times would publish videos of Israelis in the south lying dead on the streets as Hamas went on its killing spree. Also on Oct. 10, President Joe Biden appeared at the state dining room and called the terror attacks “an act of sheer evil,” noting, “This attack has brought to the surface painful memories and the scars left by a millennia of antisemitism and genocide of the Jewish people.”

At the wedding in Israel, Jonathan and Channi were celebrating life.

Provided by Jonathan Bichoupan

They felt safe in Jerusalem, the couple said in interviews. In fact, they felt more comfortable walking around the streets there, surrounded by their own people, than they do now in New York City, where antisemitism has skyrocketed amid the Middle East conflict. “No New Yorker should fear walking in our streets because of what they wear, what they believe, or where and how they practice their faith,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said on Oct. 12, two days after the couple’s wedding.

“It’s really saddening and it’s horrifying because you realize more than ever, there is a need to continue to grow and build Jewish families and to have a home for the Jewish people in Israel,” Channi said.

Jonathan and Channi flew back to the U.S. the morning after their wedding, a 6 a.m. flight. While the affair didn’t take place on Oct. 15 in Israel, their parents whipped together a last-minute gathering that evening for them in Brooklyn.

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On the dance floor in Brooklyn, surrounded by friends and family, many of those special to the couple that couldn’t make it to Israel five days earlier, Jonathan and Channi waved Israel flags to the sound of EDM music from the DJ’s booth. Loved ones waved smaller, hand-held flags, too.

They were back in America, though their hearts were still in Israel. “It was beautiful in its own way,” Jonathan said.