Virtual matchmaker-in-chief

BETH KISSILEFF JNS.ORG

Tova Weinberg will do anything to make a match – even adopt a dog. In an interview from her home in Pittsburgh, Penn., Weinberg, who co-founded the Jewish dating website SawYouAtSinai.com (SYAS), recalled her confusion when a man whom she thought was in a relationship asked to come to her Chanukah party for singles. Asked why he would attend a singles party, the man said he wanted to marry the woman he was dating, but he hated her dog. Weinberg called the woman to let her know that her boyfriend wanted to marry her – sans the dog. When the woman balked, Weinberg said, “I’ll take the dog.” Within a few months, Weinberg was a pet owner, and the couple was married.

Launched in December 2003, SYAS was one of the first Jewish dating websites. The site’s approach is unique in that it fuses the old-school shidduch (matchmaking) strategies with new-school internet dating. Unlike most dating sites, in which users independently browse profiles, SYAS relies on a team of volunteer matchmakers who scour databases of users and suggest matches to the users they represent. Only matchmakers who are married and willing to devote at least six hours per week to the project are eligible to volunteer. SYAS now boasts more than 30,000 users, and nearly 1,000 matches resulting in marriage have been made since the site’s inception a decade ago.

At the helm of the operation is Weinberg, who works from what she calls “command central,” a small desk area in her kitchen. That space is where the “magic” happens, she said. “Here is a profile. I look, think who is out there, who might be good,” she explained.

As a shadchan (matchmaker), Weinberg deals with all kinds of clients with special needs, from Asperger’s syndrome-spectrum individuals, to widows and widowers, to divorcees. She believes her toughest customer is a 30-year-old “Bais Yakov girl” (referring to the Brooklyn-based Orthodox school for girls) who is looking for a “Tom Cruise lookalike who says Tehillim (Psalms).”

Weinberg has also had male clients tell her that they are gay but haven’t come out yet to their parents. Other men have told her they aren’t interested in her matchmaking services because they have a non-Jewish girlfriend they don’t want their families to know about. In those cases and similar ones, Weinberg stays quiet, doesn’t make a match, and leaves the client to sort out his or her issues.

In fact, Weinberg got into matchmaking not to help Jews who are already observant, but to help prevent intermarriage. When Weinberg and her husband Joel moved from New York to Pittsburgh, where he works as a physician, he kept bringing home Jewish doctors with non-Jewish spouses or girlfriends. Weinberg did not feel open to hosting the non-Jewish partners due to her distress about intermarriage, but Joel told her to stop complaining and instead do something about it.

Weinberg’s matchmaking career had unofficially started before she moved to Pittsburgh. When she lived in New York in her early 20s, she got to know a philanthropist named Else Bendheim, who would host single men and women – 30 of each gender at a time – for Shabbat dinner. Bendheim told Weinberg that she would sponsor more singles events if Weinberg would host them. The first of Weinberg’s parties was a success: she connected Debbie Atlas with Mark Goldenberg, and the next day they both called her to tell her they liked each other and that it might turn into marriage.

That was Weinberg’s first success story – and she has developed a knack for making seemingly un-makeable matches. She recalled having one wealthy client who did not want to marry someone who might need him financially. She thought the wealthy man and one of her other clients had a future together, so she lied to the man that her other client was an heiress. The match was successful, and the man thanked Weinberg for not telling him the truth because he would not have gone out with the woman he now loved if he had known she was, in reality, penniless. Weinberg explained that it’s the “matchmaker’s touch” to perceive aspects of another’s character and the reasons why two people might work as a couple, even if the attributes perceived aren’t on the “list” of what the single person says he or she is looking for in a partner.

Asked about the role of technology in dating, Weinberg said she believes that there is a “sickness” where singles think more potential mates can magically appear, and so they dismiss suggested matches for trivial reasons like a girl’s hair being too curly. She says there are those who think online dating is as simple as ordering a coffee: “Take skim milk with caramel and a dash of Splenda [and] they are getting all they want.”

Regarding her own marriage of more than 30 years, Weinberg first said, “I had to settle.” Then she amended her statement. “I didn’t really settle,” she explained. “Physically, he had no hair, he was thinner and the same height as me. If I would have met him when I was 19, I would not have looked twice.” Instead, she met her husband at age 24, when she “realized what was out there.” Though Joel wasn’t her ideal match physically, Weinberg said her future husband had “everything else” – brilliance, integrity and the refusal to take no for an answer.

Weinberg has five married children and 13 grandchildren. A large family photo in her home was taken at her youngest son’s recent wedding. How did the couple meet? “He ran after her on the street,” she said proudly. For those not bold enough to make such moves, there are matchmakers like Weinberg and websites like SYAS to help Jewish singles do what it takes to find their soul mates.

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