How a new ketubah helped one couple restart after the LA fire

By Jodi Rudoren
January 17, 2025

On their 31st wedding anniversary this month, Dave and Jen Miner planned to go out for ice cream. For the big ones — “if it’s divisible by 10,” as Jen put it — the couple takes a big trip; last year, to mark their 30th, they went to the south of France. This year, they were headed to Baskin-Robbins because, you know, 31 flavors.

Then their house burned down in the Palisades Fire, two days before the anniversary. They woke up in a dog-friendly Marriott in Santa Monica, kicking themselves over some of what they’d grabbed in the frenzied moments before evacuating (three bags of granola) and what they’d left behind: sepia-toned photos of Jen’s great-grandmother Clementine in Hungary; the “special doll” and “other doll” without which their grown-up daughter could not sleep as a baby; the framed movie-ticket stub (Nightmare on Elm Street) from their very first date on Sept. 12, 1988.

And their ketubah, the Jewish wedding contract that had hung in their bedrooms all these 31 years.

“We were spinning,” Dave recalled when I spoke to the couple via Zoom this week. “It was two things: How are we going to move forward, and how am I going to get Jen to get out of bed tomorrow? Because the world isn’t over, but it does feel like it. And so it’s, ‘How do we begin?’”

Marriage is all about equilibrium, they said. So while Jen was reeling, Dave was Googling. “I thought, we’re in LA,” he explained. “There is a Judaica store somewhere that will be open; there is a ketubah for sale.”

And that’s how they ended spending their anniversary at a place called Marigold House instead of Baskin Robbins, celebrating with a new marriage contract instead of ice cream.

‘We’re sentimental that way’

The Miners met at Skidmore College, when Dave was a sophomore and went to pick up his dorm key from Jen, the resident director. They are well-off and successful.

Dave, 55, is an Emmy Award-winning TV producer of sitcoms including 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Jen, 57, is a Democratic activist and lobbyist who was a delegate to last summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Their two daughters, 25 and 23, are gainfully employed in Denver and New York.

They know well that amid these catastrophic wildfires, they are lucky to be worrying about their ketubah and not about affording a temporary place to stay; that with a death toll of 27 (so far), it is a privilege to be mourning the loss of their daughter’s dolls and not their daughter.

They are shell-shocked and also humbled by the experience. Their story is a window into how crisis always helps clarify what matters. But if what matters most is their marriage staying strong over 31 years, the little things — the movie stubs and the family photos — matter, too.

“Day 2 was a real low point,” Dave said. They realized that the things they were telling everyone — “It’s just stuff,” “We’re so glad our kids weren’t home,” “We’re so lucky,” “We’re counting our blessings” — were true but not the whole truth.

“Items are personal for a reason,” he explained. “We don’t have a lot of things, and the things that we keep have a little bit of meaning. A certain favorite mug that you use. Whatever it is, there’s probably some connection to something. So we began to realize all those little things, whether they’re refrigerator magnets or the ketubah … you know, we’re sentimental that way.”

‘It’s time to go’

Dave was at work in Beverly Hills and Jen in her home office when the fires started last Tuesday morning. A friend who lives down the coast texted to say she thought the flames might be heading toward their Palisades neighborhood. Jen looked out her window, over their backyard and into Will Rogers State Park, and saw bright blue sky. A few minutes later, she checked out the front door — the smoke looked like it was only a block away.

She texted Dave, who Googled “dog-friendly hotel” and booked one while driving home, and FaceTimed the girls to ask what they wanted her to grab.

“My 23-year-old, Jessica, said some stuff from her high school that was valuable to her that was in a shoe box — I got it. She said a few other things, I got it,” Jen recalled. “And Emily, our 25-year-old, said, ‘I would like the letter that great-grandpa wrote me when I was in camp when I was 11.’”

They’d been through this drill once before, in 2019, when they returned after two days with no damage to the house. Jen figured it would be similar this time. She grabbed food for the dog, a 12-year-old terrier mix named Willie; two pairs of leggings, two pairs of socks, two pairs of underwear, two shirts; and two precious rings she inherited from her grandmother, who came to the U.S. from Hungary before World War II.

“In the packing you’re sort of making this odd, calculated bet, right?” Dave said.  “Because if you take everything, in some cosmic universe, you’re saying, ‘Oh, this thing is real.’”

He went up to the attic and filled a backpack with some old photographs he never digitized and a few of the girls’ school art projects. Their wedding album. A Western Union telegram of well-wishes sent to his grandparents for their wedding back in 1937.

A friend who works in emergency management texted Dave suggesting he take photos of everything in every room of the 4,200-square-foot home, for insurance purposes, so he did.

“And then, you know, the buzzer went off or whatever it was and it was, like, it’s time to go, our friends are leaving,” Dave said.

Jen cut in: “All the phones in the Palisades went off at the same time saying, ‘This is now a mandatory evacuation.’”

The Miners knew within hours that their house was gone. In fact, they sort of watched it happen on their phones, because of the Nest doorbell camera and other security devices they had installed in the five-bedroom house.

“I literally saw my neighbor’s house in flames, and the flame jumped my lawn, and then 20 minutes later the camera cuts out,” Dave recounted. “Then 10 minutes later, the alarm company sends me a ping that your downstairs fire alarm is on, and then 20 minutes after that the upstairs alarm notification goes off, and then 20 minutes after that the car alarm goes off.

“So all the digital fingerprints are sort of coming in and saying, ‘Oh, my house is gone, there’s no version where my house is not gone.’”

‘It just felt right’

They’d moved into the house on Chautauqua Boulevard a decade ago, after living for a dozen years in a house two blocks away that was also destroyed in last week’s fire. Their whole block is gone, their whole neighborhood, including Cafe Vita, the Cal-Mex joint they went to every Saturday after karate lessons when the girls were small. The whole downtown.

The day of the disaster, realizing they’d left behind all their hats, Dave went into a shop called Lids on the Santa Monica Promenade and had two made with the Palisades ZIP code, 90272. “It just felt right,” he said.

It was the same with the ketubah. When they first walked into Marigold House, the Judaica store in Westwood, and said they needed one, the clerk assumed they had just gotten engaged. Before the Miners could explain, Dave’s eye caught a stack of yarmulkes to personalize for bnai mitzvah, mentioned that those keepsakes from their own kids’ simchas were no more, and Jen kind of lost it.

“Water works, you know,” he said.

Their story spilled out all at once — the fire, the anniversary, the long-ago wedding.

“It was pretty dramatic,” Jen said. “I felt a little bad for her. She was trying to give us tea.”

The clerk showed them a book of sample ketubahs from which couples custom-order weeks or months ahead of their weddings. But the Miners needed to walk out of the store with a contract in hand, on their anniversary, right now. “Like a Vegas wedding,” Jen said.

There was a pile of take-home ketubahs in the back. Their original ketubah had a tree of life on it, but they both locked on one by the artist Mickie Caspi called Songs of Love. It had birds on it — Jen loves birds. Her first pet was a parakeet, and their Palisades home was frequented by a pair of owls they’d hear hooting at night.

“It just felt right,” Dave said again. “To both of us, very instantly.”

‘Start living like we live’

The days since have been something of a blur. Remembering the 2019 evacuation experience, Dave had only booked the original Marriott for two nights, so they had to switch hotels on their anniversary. On Monday, they switched again, to a place that was half the price and more like an apartment, with a living room and a kitchen.

“We need to have a carton of milk and a bowl of cereal,” Jen said.

“Start living like we live,” Dave cut in.

“It reminds me of a European place,” Jen added. “It’s very homey, and old, and a little bit creaky — like a house house. With a kitchenette, and a teeny tiny bathroom.”

Dave bought some new socks and shirts at Target; Jen has mostly been wearing the burgundy long-sleeve she happened to have on the day of the fire, from a dog-friendly pub in Colorado Springs, where one of the kids went to college.

After a week, they sent Willie the dog to stay with his dog-walker far from the fire zone. They bought Jen a new laptop. Eventually, they’ll have to replace Dave’s car, an electric BMW they bought two months ago that is now a heap of melted metal.

It helps, a little, that so many people are in the same situation. The hotels and restaurants in Santa Monica are filled with evacuees who look at each other knowingly. The other night, when their server learned the Miners had lost their home, their meal was comped. Everyone who didn’t lose their home seems to be donating clothes or distributing meals to those who did.

“I think today was the first day I didn’t cry in public,” Jen said on Day 6. (Dave did, at a restaurant, “because he had a salad we used to get,” she explained. He is, after all, the sap who framed that movie stub for their first wedding anniversary.)

The couple doesn’t know what the next few months will look like, but they fully plan to rebuild their home in the Palisades, to whatever new fire standards the city and insurance companies require.

They’re grateful that their synagogue, Kehilat Israel, is still standing, and imagine they’ll soon have a small ceremony there to sign their new ketubah.

Maybe afterward, they’ll head to Baskin-Robbins for some ice cream.

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