The Lost Custom of the Pre-Wedding Dinner for the Poor (Yiddish: di oreme vetshere)

From a memoir of Rabbi Reuven Agushewitz (1897-1950) on life in the Lithuanian shtetl:

The night before a wedding there was a custom to make a dinner for the poor – a dinner which was certainly no worse, and sometimes even better, than the dinner for the families and their guests. Don’t forget that with this dinner the idea was not to make an impression on anybody, but to succeed with the Master of the Universe, upon Whose will the entire happiness of the young couple depends. Aside from this dinner, generous donations were set aside for the poor. At the dinner, poor people from the surrounding shtetls convened, among whim one could find usually also comic talents, merry beggars, who wanted to show off their stuff and thus regaled the crowd. I myself was at a Poor Man’s Supper at my brother’s wedding – it was the best meal I ever had, even better than the dinner of the Hospitality Committee to which my father used to take me. (Faith and Heresy by Reuven Agushewitz, translated from Yiddish by Mark Steiner, New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2006, p. 8 n)