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Make Me an Imperfect Match
Esther Hartog Brussels
"Hello, just want to let you all know I am moving from Morristown to Maplewood," read the e-mail from Rabbi Yeheskel Lebovic. The message reached Nathan, a 29-year-old Brussels lawyer. More than a year ago, Nathan had registered with Likrat Shiduch, a New Jersey-based matchmaking service run by Lebovic and his wife. Nathan had sent a check for $500 and gone on three unsuccessful dates, but then had not heard from Lebovic again until that August e-mail, which was sent simultaneously to about 50 other clients.
Nathan was irked by the breach of confidentiality. "On their website," he protests, "the Lebovics claim to be very discreet and never to disclose any personal contact information from clients without their permission. But the e-mail header contained the electronic addresses of all his clients."
The next day Nathan received an e-mail from another Lebovic client, again addressed to all the people on the matchmaker's list, asking whether anyone had had a positive experience with Likrat Shiduch. It turned out that while they all had paid large sums of money, none of those who responded was satisfied.
Lebovic dismisses Nathan's claim of having to pay $500 as an "outright lie." No one, he says, has to pay more than $180 upon registration. He sees nothing wrong with disclosing e-mail addresses.
Likrat Shiduch's matchmaking operation is one of the hundreds catering to single Jews all over the world trying to find a mate. Until recently, approaching a Jewish matchmaker was only for the very religious or the very desperate. But now more and more young single Jews, highly educated, good-looking and holding well-paying jobs, acknowledge that they too make use of matchmaking services. These new clients may be Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, sometimes traditional, even secular. Their common denominator: they all want a Jewish spouse, but none of them has the time or opportunity to find his or her basherter � Yiddish for "predestined" � through the regular dating circuit.
Julie, a 25-year-old Londoner, is one of them. "I was raised in a traditional Jewish family," she says. "I have a university degree, work full-time as a business consultant and do not have the time to find myself a husband. I have tried going to parties and Jewish singles weekends, but most of the time, I am just too tired for it."
She is not convinced such events are the best way to meet someone anyway. "Contact is usually very superficial," she says. "Besides, most of my married friends met their mates elsewhere � at high school, during a year they spent in Israel, or through mutual friends. That has not worked for me. So what option is left?"
Nathan tells a similar story. "I was raised in a very Jewish home. We did not really keep kosher, but we always celebrated Shabbat and the holidays. I can't imagine marrying someone who's not Jewish, but the question is, where do I meet Jewish girls? I often don't get home from work before 8 p.m. So everything depends on the weekends. Going to shul is not exactly my thing."
Julie was referred to a British matchmaker by a local rabbi her parents know well. "At first," she recalls, "I felt a bit awkward about it, but I must say the rabbi was very nice and discreet." Nathan preferred Internet matchmaking services. "I would never call a traditional matchmaker," he explains. "I suppose it still has this image of the last resort you go to when you are old, ugly and desperate."
Nathan's and Julie's experiences suggest that both the traditional agencies and the new ones � Internet dating sites, chat rooms and computer matchmaking services � suffer from the same problem: credibility.
"The matchmaker I was referred to talked to me on the phone," says Julie. "She was very kind and made a good impression. She told me she'd search in her database and asked me to call back in a few days. Which I did. By then, she did not remember who I was. I had to introduce myself all over again. She then told me I had to pay $3,000 for her services, and another $4,000 upon marriage. I was astonished and said she had not mentioned anything about it last time we spoke. She said I probably had not listened very well. I said the rabbi who referred me to her also had not mentioned it. 'Oh, you were referred by Rabbi so-and-so,' she replied, 'in that case you only have to pay $1,000 for registration and $2,000 upon marriage.'
"Next she gave me information about guys she had in her database. She suggested I meet a 'very nice handsome Russian young man, a successful businessman who has lived in London since 1993.' At the end of the story I found out he was 41 � and I was only 24 at the time! I told her I wanted someone my own age, but she kept pushing me, telling me this was a very nice man. Finally, she promised to introduce me to another person, but never called me back."
JULIE DID NOT PAY THE MATCHmaker. Her trouble was just the kind of tangle Nathan hoped to avoid. "My main reason for using Internet matchmakers was to keep control over things myself," he says. "I wanted no complications. There's a lot of rabble among these Internet matchmaking sites, yet if you search well, you will also find a few that appear very thorough, solid and trustworthy. For example, it is a good sign when they are affiliated with a known synagogue or rabbi, or when they are registered in a chamber of commerce. When you register you have to fill out a long list of questions, spelling out your preferences in great detail. Either a computer or the people at the agency then try to match your profile with others.
"The problem with the ads on the net is that you don't know how serious a person is about dating. Two of the people I corresponded with turned out to write under false names and refused to tell me their real names. Many people respond to several ads at the same time � which is understandable, because you want to increase your opportunities. I have done the same myself. But it's often very superficial. You can actually sense sometimes that they write you thinking you were the other guy whose ad they also responded to. It puts you off if they ask you, after five letters, 'Tell me again, what do you do for a living?' So it's even possible I'd actually like some of the people I corresponded with, had I met them personally and got to know them. But usually the correspondence dies out before you get to that level."
Nathan subscribed to free as well as paid services. "The free self-service matchmaking sites helped me to get in touch with tens, perhaps hundreds of people. You put your ad up and just wait for the response, or you reply to other people's ads. I have corresponded with many people, with some for over a year. I have met seven of them. It was nice, but we did not make a good match. When I subscribed to the paid services, I never did so without e-mailing them and asking for the conditions, for their refund policies if things would not work out."
He registered with two paid services, both of which were religious, because he thought they would probably not be in the business for the money, but for the mitzvah. "I was completely wrong about that," he says. "After I e-mailed them a few times, I subscribed to a Canadian matchmaking service, the Orthodox Connection. I mailed them my profile and the required check for $180."
The check was immediately cashed. For the next five months, Nathan waited for the Orthodox Connection, which has four couples working as matchmakers, to introduce him to young women. But it never happened. Finally, Nathan e-mailed the agency and asked what was going on. He received no reply. He e-mailed them again two weeks later, then again 10 days after that. Finally, he wrote them by regular mail, asking for a refund. The letter remained unanswered. He wrote two more letters in the following month. The last one was returned to him unopened. He never got a refund.
The Jerusalem Report contacted the Orthodox Connection by phone. Zelig Spillman, who runs the agency with his wife, Ahava, insisted: "The fee is a processing fee. If someone cannot pay it, it will be waived initially. It is a one-time fee whether it takes a day, a week, a month, a year or a decade to help a client."
Spillman says they have about 950 clients in their database. Asked about success rates, he replies: "I cannot answer this as a rate. Some have become engaged within one week of meeting with us, others are still single. We do not count our marriages per year. Once we got into double figures, we stopped counting. We are not a dating service. If we don't have a potential match, we won't set up anyone. This is explained when someone joins our service. We cannot manufacture the perfect match." He says he searches for matches using his own database and by contacting rabbis. He is not in touch with Jewish student groups or Jewish social workers, but does attend events frequented by singles.
It was while he was still waiting for an answer from the Canadian agency that Nathan was referred to Lebovic's Likrat Shiduch, a Lubavitch-inspired matchmaking service in New Jersey. "A friend of mine thought they would be more credible," he says. "The Likrat Shiduch people travel a lot, so I could get to meet them in Europe first." Nathan called Lebovic, who said he would not be in Europe for the time being, but that he was already willing to introduce Nathan to young women. Nathan agreed.
He was introduced to three girls from different countries. "They were nice, but simply not my type," Nathan says. "The fact that someone is your age, well-educated and coming from a traditional Jewish home does not automatically mean you like someone or are attracted to her. I did not have the feeling any effort had been made to find someone who fitted my personality � something beyond my age, level of observance and educational background."
He soon decided none of them was suitable. "I told this to Rabbi Lebovic," the young Belgian lawyer reports, "and he said he would search on for me, but that I first needed to make a small deposit to cover his expenses. He asked me to pay $500. I sent him a check, and that was the last I heard from him � until the e-mail in August."
Lebovic responds: "When people tell you they were never called back, they usually exaggerate. Those who call more often are simply likely to get more introductions. You usually hear more from the complainers than from the satisfied clients." He and his wife are professional educators who have been matchmaking for 23 years. They boast a database of 7,000 clients. They say they have two to four engagements a month, but beyond that they can produce no success-rate statistics and cannot tell the average time it takes from registration to marriage. Challenged on their charges, he retorts: "We don't ask thousands of dollars. We ask $180 registration fee and another $1,000 on marriage. This is not a big sum and does not cover our expenses. The registration is officially non-refundable, although occasionally we give partial refunds at our discretion, depending on circumstances."
NATHAN'S AND JULIE'S STOries are by no means exceptional. "Orthodox people have always known how difficult it is to work with matchmakers," says Sarah, 32, an Orthodox woman from Antwerp, who was introduced to her husband by a traditional matchmaker, who also found husbands for two of her older cousins. "The problem is that a shadkhan is by definition in the stronger position. If the client complains he is not being introduced to people, they can always claim the client has a difficult profile, that he has too many demands, or that there is temporarily no one in the database who matches his or her profile. The same goes for the fee. The agency will always claim they need the money to cover the expenses. But who knows what these expenses are? And how do you check if the matchmaker is really making the promised calls? There's no transparency at all."
That's no comfort to Lea, 31, a Belgian nurse now living in London. "After wasting a lot of money on local and Internet matchmaking agencies," she says, "I approached World Of Singles, an Israeli Jewish agency, which claims to work with offices in Europe. The agent, Carol Shaw, told me she had tens, if not hundreds of potential matches in her files. I registered and paid her $600. Within a week I met five guys she introduced me to, but none was right for me. I expected she'd continue to introduce me to people, but that did not happen."
Like Nathan, Lea feels that "I was merely set up with someone my age and level of religious observance. No one seemed to care if our personalities and lifestyles had anything in common." After a few weeks, she contacted the agency again, and Shaw finally sent her data of three or four young men, who proved to be equally unsuitable. "I also asked her for the numbers of her affiliates in Europe. When I called them after I returned home, they did not have anyone for me. They promised to contact me when they had someone. They never called back." That was nearly three years ago.
Carol Shaw responds: "World of Singles is very successful. We have a database of several thousand and concluded more than 80 marriages last year, 15 of them international."
But compare that to the most successful general � non-Jewish � agency in Holland, which is headed by Annelies Penning. It is registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce and is subject to national consumer laws. Its database is as large as Shaw's, but Penning claims a 50 percent success rate.
"That means marriage within a year for half of my clients," she says. "I only accept those whom I think I can match with another client. I want to know who they are, how they have become the person they are today, what kind of relationships they have had in the past. I do not talk so much about their hobbies and personal interests as I do about their philosophy of life, their norms and values. What are their views of the world, of society? It is my experience that people who share similar views on these issues have a higher chance of matching each other than two people who share the same interest in a particular sport. I also coach my clients before every new introduction. I do more than just providing a phone number." Perhaps Jewish matchmakers should take a leaf out of her book.
(December 17, 2001)
Jewish World
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