Complaint Review: Rabbi Aryeh Alpern

We had such a miserable experience with this Rabbi that, in our opinion, we would recommend anyone who needs a Rabbi for an interfaith wedding (or any wedding) look elsewhere. What we received was NOTHING like what was promised. He promised a fully custom wedding and made us pay $750 upfront for the consultation alone. He made us pay on the spot and said it would be another $750 for him to do the ceremony too. What we got was the most depressing cheezy wedding template outline, that he handed us with mix and match prayers and sayings like we were at Denny's choosing soup or salads --it was absolutely NOT custom-- then he all but told us to write any changes we wanted ourselves! We told him we were very unhappy about this, that this was not a custom ceremony AT ALL, and even reminded him that on the homepage of his website he actually says his weddings are NEVER templated.

We were stunned. It's like you go to buy a made to measure suit and they hand you one off the rack. Just to clarify that our expectations were in line, we have since found several people who do REAL non-templated, custom wedding ceremonies and they were exactly what we expected -- personalized and custom, with no canned templates and corny mix and match prayers. Also, in our meeting with this Rabbi, he asked us at most maybe 5 or 6 very superficial questions about ourselves, yet he told us more than 3 times where his kids went to college and on and on. Can one really plan a custom ceremony without knowing about the couple? How selfish and narcissistic, in our opinion, to treat a couple who comes to you for their wedding like this, and to sit there and talk about yourself and your kids for what seemed like half the time. After the consultation which, to reiterate, was nothing like we thought we had been promised, we asked for our money back.

We even called to ask for our money back and his wife was very impolite to my fiancee said there were no refunds then hung up on her! Shockingly unprofessional. Aftter days of unanswered emails, and lost sleep over losing $750 we cannot afford to lose for our wedding, we threatened to write reviews of our experience and possibly seek legal action, he sends us an email acting like nothing has happened and offering to now write a custom ceremony. Clearly he knew what custom means -- so why did he wait until we were threatening him to offer this? One needs to ask oneself, how out of touch someone is if they think they can treat a couple so poorly, to the point that they are about to use legal action, then act like nothing happened and think we would go along with that? We feel that perhaps the most upsetting part of planning our wedding so far has been what happened with this Rabbi. Avoid at all costs!!