Samuel Eli Gardenswartz and Joshua Nahum Geller Schwartz seemed to have two things in common: some sort of connection to Russia and fathers who were rabbis. At least that was all Gardenswartz’s cousin, Hillary, a colleague of Schwartz’s, had to go on when she decided to set them up in February 2020.
During a three-hour, Sunday afternoon date two weeks later at Grounded, a now-closed coffee shop in Greenwich Village, they immediately realized the Russia connection was a bit of a stretch.
“I studied abroad in St. Petersburg,” said Schwartz, 30, who graduated from Vassar with a bachelor’s degree in art history and is now a senior manager on the marketing team at the Jewish Education Project, a nonprofit organization. “Sam likes to read a lot of boring history books.”
Gardenswartz, 35, who graduated magna cum laude from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in religious studies, was fascinated by biographies on Rasputin and Catherine the Great, but, like Schwartz, became a fan of fantasy in his teens, especially Christopher Paolini’s “Eragon” series.
During the date, Schwartz, who then lived in Harlem, shared another interesting tidbit: Their fathers, both Conservative rabbis, actually knew each other while studying at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and were ordained in 1998.
Six months later, another amazing connection emerged. Their maternal grandfathers, also Conservative rabbis, went to the same yeshiva in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1940s.
“How wild it is,” Schwartz said, “the amount of vast changes from our grandparents’ lives to ours.”
Gardenswartz said their grandfathers, both in their own ways, were “on the vanguard of L.G.B.T.Q.” and “incredibly accepting.” His “saba,” as he referred to his grandfather, Rabbi Arnold Goodman, in Hebrew, died in 2023.
After Gardenswartz downed six glasses of water at the coffee shop, Schwartz, who thought “he was cute, interesting, charming and smart,” accompanied him to Porto Rico Importing Co. nearby to pick up a bag of hazelnut coffee and chocolate-covered orange peels.
“One of my many dreams is just to run errands with my partner,” said Gardenswartz, who now works remotely from Brooklyn as a senior vice president of e-commerce and retention at Grüns, a gummies dietary supplement company.
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They met again the next Thursday at Fotografiska, a Swedish photography museum that was then on Park Avenue South in Manhattan, and had dinner afterward at Tacombi, a Mexican taqueria nearby. Later, a first kiss followed in the cold outside.
“He looked very cute in a black turtleneck,” Gardenswartz said.
As Purim approached in early March, they made raspberry jam and chocolate-filled hamantaschen, a tri-cornered holiday cookie, at Gardenswartz’s apartment. “I’m a big baker,” said Gardenswartz, 35, whose Instagram handle is Bakes by Fruitcake. (For the wedding, he made a three-tier buttercream-frosted cake, which took him nine hours to make.)
When the pandemic took hold, the two were separated for four months. At first, Schwartz stayed in Harlem and Gardenswartz hunkered down with his parents in Newton, Mass. In April 2020, after Schwartz’s mother, Rebecca Geller Schwartz, was diagnosed with colon cancer, he went to Baltimore, where his parents lived, for a few weeks.
“I told my parents we were dating,” around Rosh Hashana in September 2020, Schwartz said. His mother, who died in February 2022, “was very amused that they knew his family.”
The two passed time during the early months of Covid on FaceTime, playing Boggle and watching “Elite,” a Spanish teen drama on Netflix. In May, for Schwartz’s birthday, they virtually baked babka together. And at the end of June, they spent a couple of weeks together in Boston and enjoyed a Shabbat dinner in Newton with Gardenswartz’s family in their backyard.
“We decided we were boyfriends,” Gardenswartz said.
In September 2023, the couple got an apartment together in a Park Slope, Brooklyn, brownstone, and in June 2024, adopted their Russian blue cat Bubbeleh, for short, which means “sweetie” in Yiddish. Her full name is the Magical Bubbeleh Tumbalalaika Goodman Geller Gardenswartz Schwartz Gardenschwartz Katz.
On Aug. 22, 2025, they revisited a half-dozen meaningful places in their relationship around the city, and when they reached a quiet corner in Prospect Park, they played rock, paper, scissors. “Josh won,” Gardenswartz said, and proposed first, followed by Gardenswartz, each with lab-grown diamond bands.
On Aug. 23, the grooms’ fathers and Schwartz’s grandfather led a wedding ceremony at the Liberty Warehouse, an event venue in Brooklyn. Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz, of Temple Emanuel of Newton, Mass., officiated the ceremony, with Rabbi Steven Schwartz of Beth El Congregation in Baltimore, and Rabbi Myron Geller, rabbi emeritus at Temple Ahavat Achim, in Gloucester, Mass. Eleven flower children were in attendance, along with 280 guests, including Gardenswartz’s mother, Shira Goodman.
The grooms wore Bindle & Keep suits — Schwartz’s with a burgundy window pane pattern, and Gardenswartz’s, maroon and pink pinstripes. “We both took turns being the bride,” the grooms said with a laugh, modifying Jewish traditional blessings, the receiving line and walking down the aisle.
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