In the beginning there were no dating services. The very first thing that even resembled a dating service was started by a Jewish woman.

Way back when, the Jewish people wandered through the desert with herds of sheep. There was always an older woman called a matchmaker who paired up young, single people who, for some reason, couldn’t pair up on their own. Stories were written about matchmakers, songs, and entire books. “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch.”

These lyrics didn’t come out of thin air. They came out of the existence of the little old Jewish ladies who performed that particular service since the days of the Old Testament.

Today there are thousands of dating services around the country, many of which have dedicated their services to matching up Jewish singles. Each and every one of them tries to be different in a business that is essentially the same everywhere. They do background checks, profiles of interests, habits, likes and dislikes and then try to match people up based on similarities in their answers. Some Jewish dating services simply offer people a presentation, some on video, some in printed folders, where a prospective single can, for a fee, sit down and browse through the prospective date files, write down phone numbers and then later make contact. One Jewish dating service even went so far as to arrange single prayer services at local temples during the High Holidays, matching up singles, who would have been attending the services anyway by putting them together in a special seating area.

Interestingly, the bulk of Jewish dating clients are not deeply religious people. They’re Jewish but some haven’t been to a temple in years. For some reason, they just feel more attracted to Jewish members of the opposite sex than to people outside their religion. It’s not the Jewish religion that brings them together, it’s being Jewish.