Avital Romberg didn’t think she would get engaged within just seven months of meeting someone. Born and raised in Denver, CO, she was working as a photographer for Jewish life events and knew the Denver Jewish community well, but felt that her person was somewhere else. She signed up for SawYouAtSinai (SYAS), an online Jewish dating website that pairs singles through shadchanim, or matchmakers. She was introduced virtually to Ben, a fellow Orthodox Jew and lawyer who was completing a judicial clerkship in Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands. After six weeks of chatting, they met in Miami and were married the following year. Three years later, Romberg became a shadchan herself.
“It was a mix between wanting to give back, because I’m so grateful, and wanting to connect with Jews,” she says. Since becoming a SYAS shadchan last fall, she has arranged 135 matches, defined on the site as when the two parties have agreed to meet. Romberg has a better idea than most of what’s involved in finding the right person. “One of these days,” she says, “I want to photograph the wedding of one of my matches.”
Shadchan, a matchmaker, is a Hebrew word linked to the word shidduch, which is the match itself. Both are used in Yiddish as well, and mostly in Orthodox circles. Shadchan dates to medieval literature, says Lily Kahn, the head of Hebrew & Jewish studies at University College London. Known as a professional marriage broker, the old-fashioned shadchan, typically a woman, relied on knowledge of the shtetl’s goings-on to pair singles together. Thought to be doing holy work, the shadchan was upheld as an honorable member of the community and received a percentage of the dowry if the couple eventually married. But it wasn’t always the most glamorous job. “To bring together grooms with brides is not an enviable task,” wrote a matchmaker in a 1902 letter trying to set up the daughter of a wealthy businessman. “May a good Jew never know from such a thing.”
The shadchan is making a comeback for those who prefer an expert over an algorithm.
One could argue the first shadchan was God, who made the match between Adam and Eve. Later, in Genesis, Abraham requests his servant, Eliezer, to fetch a wife for his son, Isaac. Eliezer travels to the town of Nahor and knows he found a good match when Rebekah offers to get water for the camels he’s brought on his journey. But the most well-known modern cultural example is Fiddler on the Roof’s Yente, who, in Russia circa 1905, sets Tzeitel, the family’s eldest daughter, up with an affluent butcher despite her attraction to her childhood sweetheart. “Even the worst husband—God forbid—is better than no husband—God forbid,” Yente declares.
Just as Tzeitel and her sisters eschew tradition and shrug off Yente’s advice, shadchanim would eventually lose their cultural clout. In a 2018 Tablet piece, Professor of Judaic Studies Jenna Weissman Joselit documented how, from the late 19th century, shadchanim were “lampooned for their garrulousness and guile.” Samuel Lewenkrohn’s 1905 short story “The Shadchen’s Luck” saw Baruch the matchmaker fail against the freedom of a dance hall, where couples could pair up as they saw fit, not by someone pulling the strings. That story pointed to how attitudes toward dating were changing—we can figure it out on our own, thanks very much.
Jumping ahead a century, methods for Jews to meet Jews proliferated with the internet. Dating apps Jdate, Jswipe and Tribe were founded in 1997, 2014 and 2015, respectively. Lox Club, based on a 1923 New York City delicatessen and gathering space, bills itself as a “membership-based dating app for Jews with ridiculously high standards.”
Still, the shadchan is making a comeback for those who prefer an expert over an algorithm. Dating sites like SYAS and Adopt A Shadchan streamline the matchmaking process, combining old-fashioned knowledge with rapid connection. Marc Goldmann, the founder of SYAS, says that the process is intensive—preferences include political beliefs, education level, vaping habits—but personal. The site’s matchmakers “can get down to that level of understanding who that person is, sometimes knowing them for many years, doing interviews, helping them through the process,” he says.
Certainly, the shadchan offers a way out of digital fatigue. In 2025, Forbes reported that 78 percent of dating app users described feeling burnout, which explains the allure of outsourcing the gruntwork of constant chatting and dead ends. Dakota Johnson played a matchmaker in last year’s Materialists, and The New York Times and New York Magazine both recently reported on the rise of high-end, secular companies like Agape, Select Date Society, Modern Love Club and Match Resource. The 2023 Netflix show Jewish Matchmaking, a cross between Love Island and Supernanny, helped raise the profession’s profile as well. In the first episode, dating coach Aleeza Ben Shalom meets Dani, who’s hunting for a thick-eyebrowed man, and Ori, whose parents sit in on his first matchmaking session. Here, a shadchan was no longer ancient and religious, but vibrant and accommodating.
“I live, eat and breathe matchmaking,” says Ben Shalom, who now hosts a matchmaking podcast and is the author of three books, most recently 2025’s Matchmaker Matchmaker. She says her journey progressed from volunteering to “more than a full-time job,” coaching couples to meet their “HQH”—high-quality human.
“What’s different today is the world is so much larger and simultaneously so much smaller,” she says. She could give a client the name of a potential match, and they might play detective, doing their own version of a background check. Or maybe they use a dating app on their own. She doesn’t forbid it, but she finds users can be too impulsive—looks aren’t everything, after all. In a half-second, they may swipe right and reject a potential partner of their dreams without even meeting them. Still, this shadchan isn’t deterred. “I like a challenge,” she says.
Ben Shalom’s company, Marriage Minded Mentor, usually works with religious Jews, but when New York-based Liz Feldman met one of the team members at a party, she decided to give it a try. “They met me where I was, understood when I told them I wasn’t particularly observant,” Feldman says, noting that having a Jewish family was still important to her. Chatting with her mentor, what they call the shadchan, was easy: “It was like talking with your cousin.” She was paired with Brett, a lawyer, and they became engaged about a year after initially meeting.
She wishes it were under better circumstances, but Ben Shalom admits that in the midst of global upheaval, more singles than ever are requesting her assistance. During the COVID pandemic and the Israeli war in Gaza, more people have found themselves reconnecting with their Judaism and their future. It’s never too late to date, either—her clients range from 19 to 89. “When everybody is frustrated and upset and outraged with what’s happening in the world, people are ready to find their person,” she says. That’s where the work of shadchanim like her and Romberg begins, flipping through their Rolodexes to see who could match a client’s specific interests and needs, whether it’s a peanut allergy or height preference. Romberg likens it to sales. “You’re gonna knock on a lot of doors and get a lot of no’s,” she says, “but you just need one yes.”