In the history of matchmakers, God had it easy: Adam was the only boy, Eve the only girl. They already lived in the same neighborhood. In terms of matchmaking, it could only get harder. 

Eliezer had to travel to his master Abraham’s homeland, find Rebecca and drag her all the way back to Isaac in Canaan. Then there was the Diaspora, the Holocaust, the 1970s … By the time the early ’80s rolled around, times were tough for Jewish singles.  While tight-knit Orthodox communities still maintained a tradition of early marriage and shadchanim (professional matchmakers á la Fiddler on the Roof), social norms in America were making dating difficult for many Jews.

Where once dating for marriage had been a high school or college activity, in the 1980s  men and women were going out into the world, finding a career, finding themselves, then trying to find someone to marry. Young Jews dispersed throughout cities, settling down near jobs rather than near traditionally Jewish communities. To our generation this is no big deal. We hop on JDate or Facebook and voila! We’re connected. But we’re talking about the comparative Dark Ages here. No Internet. No cell phones. Going to a bar was unlikely to yield many Jewish prospects and the few Jewish social events held were miserable affairs sparsely attended by wallflowers.   

Something needed to change, and in classic Jewish fashion the new came from a twist of the old: three Jewish mothers holding their arms skyward and lamenting, “Oy, what is the world coming to?”

Those three were Judy Friedman, Irene Nathan and Lorraine Glassenberg. All had sons in their 20s and all had the same 

Jewish-mother worry: “How are our boys going to meet nice Jewish girls?” 

It was Nathan’s idea originally – revive the matchmaking ways of the Old Country, but make it relevant for modern Jewish singles. Nathan had run a group for singles on her own, but the group setting wasn’t working, so she turned to Friedman and Glassenberg, both having recently graduated with Masters degrees in counseling, to help her with a new approach.

The concept was simple: Three nice, middle-aged women would put young Jews together in Chicago so they might, you know, actually get married. They called themselves The Matchmakers. It was so radically conservative, so blatantly traditional, that it’s surprising no one had come up with the idea before. There was nothing like it around for young Jews. 

“We started an industry,” Friedman says.

And bit by bit they did. In the winter of 1982 they began discretely posting flyers at synagogues and distributing handouts to friends. They charged $18. 

In the beginning only a handful of people showed up, but out of that small group one couple formed, and word of the success got around. More people started to trickle in. Then, after 18 months, their luck hit gold: Paul Galloway, a well-known writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote an article about their service and their first successful engagement. 

The one-two punch of marriage and media brought in 50 people. “And when you have 50 people you can really start making choices,” Friedman says. “It was fateful that two of the first people liked each other, but once we had 50 people it began to feel like something was happening.”

Indeed, something was happening. Soon after the Sun-Times article the service took off, and then the real fun began.

***

If you went to The Matchmakers sometime between 1982 and 2003, this is how things would go. To start, you would call and set up a meeting. There was no office, no intermediaries. You would show up at one of the women’s houses, probably offered something to eat (how could a Jewish mother resist?), and been asked to sit and start schmoozing.

The interview would take about an hour, your picture would be snapped with a Polaroid and stapled to the back of your profile, and from there you were in the hands of The Matchmakers. 

Nathan and Glassenberg handled most of the interviews and Friedman made the matches. Unlike modern matchmaking services, this wasn’t a matter of database diving and automated profile matching. Though Friedman kept all the hardcopy profiles for active clients in one big binder, the matchmaking was much more than sifting through files. In a process somewhere between friend-to-friend networking and mother’s intuition, Friedman came up with a list of matches. 

If you were a man, you could call back in the next few days to get this list. Friedman would give you four names, phone numbers and maybe a qualifier or two: “Dark hair, likes camping.” No picture, not much else.

“The men would always say, ‘Which one should I call first?’” Friedman recalls. “And I would say, ‘I can’t tell you that, because if I tell you who I think is best of the four, you’ll never go out with the other three because you won’t think they’re as good.’”

If you were a woman you were even less in-the-know. The men would call, introduce themselves per the recommendation of Judy Friedman, then together you would agree to a blind date. At that moment you would hope you had entrusted your love life to the right person. 

But it was trust that made it work. 

 “I would have to look at each person and say, ‘I think you’re good, and I’m going to find someone else who also thinks you’re good,’” Friedman says. “I sincerely wanted to make people happy.”

She was in a unique position to make a difference. As in TV dating shows where the man and the woman share their impressions with the camera between scenes, each side called Friedman after a date. 

“I would hear sometimes very different versions of the date. The woman would call and say, ‘I went out with him and he talked all night. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.’ Then he would call and say, ‘She didn’t say a word. I had to keep talking.’”

It was this arrangement that made Friedman not only a matchmaker, but also a mediator, a confidant and a communal mother. She was the Knower of All, and used that knowledge to nurture and guide her clients in ways beyond the scope of online dating. More than once it was Friedman’s intuitive touch that made the difference.

“Here’s a true story with a guy named Steve and a girl name Jamie,” she begins.

Steve was a handsome lawyer who was dating lots of different women, but wasn’t getting what he wanted. “Don’t call me until you have someone perfect,” he told Friedman.

When Jamie, a cute exercise trainer at the East Bank Club, walked into The Matchmakers a few days later, Friedman knew she had a match. She called Steve and said, “Steve, she’s great, she’s adorable, go out with her.” 

“No, no, I’ve been disappointed before.”

“This time, you won’t be.” 

That same day he called Jamie and she called Friedman back saying, “I’m not going out with him. He was rude to me, saying these things haven’t worked out for him before, asking what type of person am I. Just not very pleasant.”

“Jamie, just go for coffee,” Friedman told her. “Do me a favor, just go for coffee.” 

“All right,” Jamie said.

After the coffee date, Friedman got a call. It was from Jamie.

“Oh, he’s adorable, thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said. 

For months Friedman didn’t hear from either of them, until one day Steve called.

“Steve! How are things going with Jaime?” Friedman asked.  

“Oh, I never called her back.”

“You never called her back and you didn’t tell me and she didn’t tell me? She had such a good time!”

“She didn’t seem like she had a good time. She was busy doing this, busy doing that; I thought she was pushing me away.”

“No Steve, she had a wonderful time, call her.” 

In a few months they were engaged, and later had three children. 

Sometimes she made mistakes. Once she tried to set up an animal rights activist with a woman who made fur coats, but on the whole Friedman was a master of matches. Not only could she keep long lists of qualifiers and restrictions in her head (allergic to cats, lives with his mother, doesn’t like blondes), but, like a good golfer, she always had just the right touch for the situation. 

“It’s never sure whether the quiet person needs someone who is more talkative,” she says. “It was instinct. We said, ‘That’s really gonna work.’ And it did. And some were long shots, but even those would sometimes work.”

More than anything, the work was exciting. Every new client was like a blind date for the matchmakers. Who is she going to be? Will we make a difference in her life? They were making a difference. In the span of 23 years, The Matchmakers had more than 4,000 clients, and more than 400 of them had gotten married. Occasionally there were divorces, but more than once the divorcees would come back, get married through the service again, and stay married. It was a huge success, and personalized Jewish matchmaking became trendy.

In 1997 Elsa Malinksi opened BESHERT (meaning “destiny” in Yiddish), the first competing personalized service for Jewish singles in the Chicago area. Both services found plenty of Jewish singles to go around.

Yet time passes and times change. Ten years after helping start the service, Glassenberg died. Ten years after that, the Jewish matchmaking industry caught fire on the Web, and the Jewish Internet dating scene started to take its toll on the traditional process. 

“We started to get fewer and fewer men,” Friedman says. “For 20 years we would get the most wonderful, wonderful men who found it convenient to come to us. But when the Internet came I think they liked being in charge. They liked seeing pictures and being in control.”

While The Matchmakers struggled in its old-fashioned ways, other organizations adapted. BESHERT now has a Web site where clients can submit profiles, and all matches are made with the help of a database. 

“I had to reinvent myself,” Malinski says. “It’s very important nowadays to be visible on the Internet and to keep track of things using technology.” Other matchmakers stopped taking only Jewish clients.

Either way, the era of the pen-and-paper yenta was fading, and when Nathan died in 2003, The Matchmakers finally closed shop. 

***

Today when you go to Judy Friedman’s house, the site and source of all of this, much is the same and much is different. She still has the leather chair where interviewees would sit, but instead of clients populating the house, there are only clippings and memories.

Binder upon binder of client files are piled in her basement, old articles on dating fill boxes, and news clippings about The Matchmakers are scattered about. There’s even a stack of VHS tapes of “Me and My Matchmaker,” a documentary made about their pioneering dating service. Roger Ebert gave it three stars.

Most important of all, though, is the red leather binder. Kind of like The Book of Life, this is The Book of Marriage. Each page is dedicated to one couple The Matchmakers set up and at least three photos: One each for the man and the woman when they came separately to The Matchmakers and one of them together. 

In the individual photos the clients often look a bit forlorn, frustrated or sad, but in a photo together they are different people, just happy.

“If I turn these pages,” Friedman says, her voice breaking a little, “every one is a story.”

Much like the Talmudic saying, “To save one life is as if you have saved the world,” these stories extend well beyond the initial push Friedman gave them into existence. On one page a postscript to a birth announcement reads, “Dear Judy, this is the latest manifestation of your good work, for which I remain forever grateful.” On another page are the cards a couple sends to Friedman every year on their anniversary.

“I always say that for every child that came from The Matchmakers, I consider Judy the fairy godmother to those children,” says Marilyn Zeller, who met her husband, David, through the service and now has two daughters, ages 17 and 21. “They wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for her.” 

There is wisdom here, the old kind of wisdom that you could never squeeze out of your computer or the statistics from a dating Web site. If you ask Friedman for a bit of what she has learned, this is some of what she’ll say:

“Sometimes people have an ideal in their mind of who they want to meet, and that ideal is not something you should always hold onto tightly, because you meet somebody and you enjoy yourself, but then you say, ‘Well, I really wanted someone taller than me,’ or, ‘Who I really want to marry is a doctor.’ You have to let go of your perfect ideal and go with somebody you feel really good with. On JDate you can search forever for your ideal on people’s profiles. You think you’ll find it?”

The Matchmakers may now be defunct, but Judy Friedman still makes matches. She keeps lists of her single friends and her friend’s single children, and occasionally she’ll make a suggestion or two. Since closing the service she’s facilitated no marriages, but she isn’t planning on giving up anytime soon.

To our generation the matchmaker method may seem archaic and passé, but it was personal and warm, too. For a small fee you got your very own yenta to look after you, to care about you and to watch over your love life. That may seem restrictive and staid compared with the Wild West of modern Internet dating, but if you ever get tired of JDate, you now know who to call.

Photos and text by Jake Laub

 

Dating: new methods, older people (sidebar)

Dating in college is tough. Dating as a 67-year-old is even tougher. That’s what prompted Judy Colbert of Crofton, Md. to sign up for JDate 12 years ago in hopes of finding that nice Jewish mensch. 

“I lived in a bedroom community filled with a lot of married people, most of whom are non-Jews,” Colbert said in an email.

At age 55, she signed up for JDate. While the Web site is more often used by younger Heebs, nearly 20 percent of its members are between the ages of 50 and 64. 

Through JDate Colbert has dated two different men, both from the Los Angeles area. Her first success was an Israeli man in his late 60s or early 70s who had been a paratrooper in the Israeli service. They became good friends, she says, and he helped her practice for her bat mitzvah via phone and audio tape. 

“He flew in for the service and everyone complimented me on my accent. He was kvelling. Oy,” Colbert reminisces. 

And two years after her first match, Colbert met another man who was about 50 years old. The two had a lot in common coming from journalism and advertising backgrounds. 

“[We] understood each other’s world and could gripe feeling fairly safe that the people who populated our worlds would never meet,” Colbert says.

Neither match ended in marriage and in the last year both of Colbert’s JDate friends have passed away. 

It seems no matter how many birthdays you’ve celebrated, dating is no cakewalk—JDate or not. 

- Amanda Litman

 

Forget frat parties. How about JDate? (sidebar)

Instant gratification, it seems, is a defining characteristic of college life.  Looking for a new club?  Check out the nearest billboard. Craving pizza at 3 a.m.?  Every campus has that open-late munchies place.  

 

But what if you’re searching for that perfect brown-haired-green-eyed-non-smoking-into-sports-but-still-sensitive Jewish boy your bubbe always dreamed you would find?  Well, on some campuses, the resources can be a little limited – or at least they used to be.  Now for a growing number of Jewish college students, romance, too, is only a click away.

Stacey Cohen, 20, a junior at Towson University, signed up for JDate as a freshman after becoming frustrated with the local Jewish dating scene.  

“Since we’re in the minority, it can be difficult to find someone.  There just aren’t many options if you don’t want to date outside the religion,” Cohen says.  “I already knew everyone, and I’d already had my failures.  I wanted some new Jewish meat, a nice Jewish boy.”

Luckily for those in similar positions, nice Jewish boys (and girls) are JDate’s business.  The online dating service, which bills itself as “the modern alternative to traditional Jewish matchmaking,” allows members to filter potential matches not only by age, hometown and interests, but also by uniquely Jewish features such as kosher habits and level of Shabbat observance.  Members can contact each other through the JDate chat room, messaging, or the “Flirt” feature, which allows users to send pick-up lines such as “You light up my menorah.  Looking for a new flame?”

For Cohen and Alan Schreibman, a graduate of McDaniel College (‘07), the answer was yes.  After viewing each others’ profiles several times and messaging back and forth, the two of them met this summer and have been together ever since.  

Yet despite the happy ending, Cohen and Schreibman often feel uncomfortable when people ask how they met.  

“We kind of laugh and say ‘oy,’ and then argue over who’s going to tell them,” she says.  “Personally, I feel like it’s kind of awkward.  A lot of people go, ‘Wow, I’ve heard a lot of success stories.’  Some others just say, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ but you can tell that they think otherwise.”

Cohen concedes the site can be “sketchy” at times. But, she is quick to add, “I think that everyone can find something, as long as they make it clear what they’re looking for.”  

- Cari Romm