I have heard a lot of Bucharian weddings. Let me give you some advice. When I was getting married my wifes parents were extremely pushy in getting my parents to pay more and more. The best way to handle them is to say look, I have X amount of money I can give, do whatever you want with it but I can’t afford anymore without putting myself on the street. And you should probably tell them all of this nicely. Not only that but I can promise you that bucharian weddings feel the need to make 5 different courses of meals (from which the majority of the food is thrown out if not more).
If they want extravagant tell them please go all out – but you gave them the money you can afford and that’s that.
If they start getting rude, pushy, or even threatening to call it off (which happens sadly) you *must* explain to them that the extravagance of a wedding does not make the couple happy – seeing both family happy makes them happy. We can all look at the history of insanely extravagant weddings that ended up in divorce soon thereafter.
It’s also important to speak to your daughter and son-in-law. Ask them if they need extravagant. If they say yes, tell them you gave what you could – the rest is up to them. If they say no and their parents are going as far as threatening to cancel the whole thing then you simply tell your kids, look i did my best. I can’t bend over backwards for unrealistic requests. You don’t need a giant wedding to live a happy life and in fact – the smaller the wedding the better because all the money you don’t spend on the wedding can go in their pockets to start their life together. Tell this even to the other family, better to give your daughter $X money to start up and instead of having guests PAY for their seats(Ridiculous!) the guests can instead use that money to gift to the kids.
This is not the rich world we used to live in, the economy is horrible and I can’t imagine your kids would rather have a super fancy wedding than $10k to start their lives with.
One last note – super super important – no matter what always stay cool with the other family. Don’t ever yell or get openly angry – you will end up hurting your kids a lot more in the end like this (also witnessed this with my sister in law)…her chosonds parents went so far as to call up her mother and tell her that “She OWNS her daughter now”! Amazing how jews can treat other jews….and this caused a lot and i mean a lot of grief and pain for the kids as a result of being so pushy and rude.