Nuptials: Kim Rosenberg & Ira Wagner
My wife, Tracy, and I do not know everybody at our church, but we do know Kim Rosenberg and we have met and come to love her husband, Ira Wagner. We were fortunate enough to be invited to their wedding in the Rose Garden, Portland, Oregon, last summer, 2025. What a great nuptial!
Her Smart-Aleck Remark Gave Him Pause
When Ira Wagner asked Kim Rosenberg which synagogue she belonged to in Portland, Ore., she said all of them, and that she knew “everybody.”
By Rosalie R. Radomsky Sept. 12, 2025
Ira Jay Wagner had just settled on the topic of local synagogues in Portland, Ore., in March 2022 with another guest at his neighbor’s cocktail party when Kimberly Sue Rosenberg happened to swing by.
“What about you?” he said, turning to her. “So which synagogue do you belong to?”
Her smart-aleck reply gave him pause.
“I belong to every synagogue in Portland,” she said, “and, I know everybody.” (She actually belongs to four, and Mr. Wagner had been chatting with one of her cousins).
She then moved on to work the room at the home of her business partner and friend, Mark Rosenbaum. Ms. Rosenberg, 61, is the team lead in Portland at Coldstream Wealth Management in Bellevue, Wash., advising women, especially widows, on investments. They each had a long, happy marriage — his wife died of breast cancer two months earlier, and her husband died of thyroid cancer in 2014. She has two sons and a daughter, and he has three daughters and four grandchildren.
“I was married happily for 40 years, and hadn’t been single for 45 years,” he said.
Mr. Wagner, 73, who grew up in Baltimore, had moved to Portland with his wife six months earlier to be near two of their daughters. They kept their house in Bethesda, Md., where he had retired as the president of European Capital, a subsidiary of American Capital, an investment company. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business from Southern Vermont College and received an M.B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“My mind was so closed to dating,” said Ms. Rosenberg, who grew up in Portland.
Mr. Wagner, however, was smitten. Or as he put it: “It’s much better in Italian — ‘the thunderbolt,’ or ‘colpo di fulmine,’ like in the film ‘The Godfather.’” Luckily, her name tag gave him enough to go on, and he got her email from her website.
“Would you like to have a cup of coffee and explain Jewish Portland?” he emailed the next day, for a date sometime in June. He was about to leave for Bethesda for a couple of months, and wanted to see her when he returned.
She agreed, admiring his “good snooping skills.”
In June, she suggested drinks instead at Southpark Seafood, where he gave her a book, Aaron Lansky’s “Outwitting History,” on the history of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. Mr. Wagner is chairman of its board. Ms. Rosenberg, who graduated with an independent study bachelor’s degree combining political science, Judaic studies and communications from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, had interned there one summer during college.
As a test, he asked her to name two Yiddish authors. She impressed him by rattling off three — Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
She hugged him before they parted, and they agreed to meet again after the summer, during which both had plans. He hiked in Switzerland and stayed at his vacation house in Maine; she traveled in Europe, participating in Ride for the Living, a 60-mile bike trip from Auschwitz to a new Jewish Community Center in Krakow, Poland.
In September, they went to her friend Sara Harwin’s art show opening in Portland’s eastern industrial district. “I’m going to spend a lot of time in Portland,” he said later that evening at Clarklewis, a restaurant nearby. “I’m going to look for a new partner in Portland. And, I’m hoping it’s going to be you.”
She didn’t respond, somewhat overwhelmed.
Yet, she agreed to join him for a walk that Saturday through Redwood Deck in Washington Park near his house, where they still go regularly.
When he asked her out again, she put the brakes on, saying she was busy.
“I sent her two dozen roses the next morning,” he said.
She then sent him a photo of herself holding them.
“I’d love to have dinner on Thursday,” she texted. “He won me over.”
After dinner at Amaterra restaurant and winery, he asked if he could put his arm around her as they walked to his car. A kiss soon followed. Both described it as “electric.”
In October, she joined his family for Shabbat dinner at his house, where Mr. Wagner, who loves to cook, made roast chicken, roast potatoes and green vegetables.
“I felt so at home with his family,” she said. “I knew, that’s it.”
In July 2024, after hiking the Pyrenees through France and Spain, he proposed in La Rioja, Spain, where a trail of rose petals in their hotel room led to a ring next to a bottle of Champagne and a note that said, “Will you marry me?”
On Aug. 24, Rabbi Gary Oren of Congregation Shaarie Torah in Portland officiated, with Rabbi David Shneyer of the Am Kolel Jewish Renewal Community in Rockville, Md., participating at the International Rose Test Garden in Washington Park in Portland. The 350 guests sang “Erev Shel Shoshanim,” or “Evening of Roses,” a Hebrew love song, as the bride walked down the aisle.
The children “like each other and love each other,” Ms. Rosenberg said. “It’s the greatest gift for Ira and me. It took time. They call each other bonus siblings and us a bonus mom and dad.”
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 14, 2025, Mini-Vows Section, Page 24 of the New York Times.
Henry E. Hooper 