By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
By almost anybody’s definition, Joe Shapira does not look like someone that would be cast as Yenta in Fiddler On The Roof. A heavyset, middle-aged businessman with a soft Israeli accent, he could more easily be a banker or a salesman than a matchmaker.
In fact, as co-founder and co-owner of the world’s largest suite of Internet community and cyber-dating Web sites, what he does is a far cry from the fictional shadchan’s job: pairing off a boy with poor eyesight with a less-than-beautiful girl.
Even so, Shapira said he believes the key to success for MatchNet, PLC, the company he and partner Alon Carmel formed as an umbrella for their online communities, is the same as for a good traditional matchmaking enterprise: “great customer service and professionalism.” After all, getting someone to share the details of their heart’s desires depends, more than anything else, on trust.
The company, which started with JDate in 1997, now owns and operates 11 online communities worldwide, including special sites for Jewish singles — located both in Israel and the U.S. — one for gay and lesbian seekers, and some with no particular preference areas. In fact, Shapira and Carmel have become the cyber-matchmaking mavens of the world, with approximately 90 percent of the global business in online Jewish matchmaking services.
JDate itself counts 750,000 members. According to Shapira, it is one of the most widely visited Jewish Web sites on the Internet and claims one in five Jewish singles among its members. The 11 MatchNet sites combined now have a total of 12 million members and lay claim to have been the catalyst for 25,000 marriages, including 15,000 from JDate alone.
In fact, Joan Rivers was recently reported to have joined JDate, although she has said she did not use her real name when signing up.
“I am excited that Joe Shapira, someone who is working to bring young Jews together, has agreed to come and talk to us,” said Rabbi Dan Bridge, executive director of Hillel at the University of Washington, in announcing Shapira’s campus visit on Feb. 29. “I do a number of weddings of Hillel students and Jconnect young adults each year. More and more of them have met on JDate.”
Shapira said he started JDate because “I was single and I wasn’t really happy with the quality of women I was dating. One of my friends, who was particularly critical of my women, referred me to a traditional dating agency” where, he said, he met a beautiful woman.
“For two hours she tried to get $5,000 out of me and I tried to take her out on a date. At the end of two hours, she didn’t get $5,000 from me and I didn’t get out on a date.” What he did get from the experience was the inspiration for starting JDate.
After studying books on relationships, dating services and the Internet, Shapira and Carmel, who were already partners in a successful business manufacturing video cassettes, created JDate from a computer housed in his Los Angeles apartment. To get the service off the ground, he said, they used photos of 50 of their friends, some of them married and mostly without their knowledge. In order to create the online profiles, they relied on their own knowledge of their friends to fill out the survey forms.
Starting out, he said, since both he and Carmel are Jewish and understand the culture that impels Jews to be matchmakers, they decided to focus on the JDate site.
“In the Jewish community, even more than other ethnic communities,” he said, “we are always matchmaking and trying to fix people up with each other, so we felt that this community was a good test bed for our technology and to help us refine a strong business model.”
By the end of the first year, they had signed up 10,000 members. When they began, there were about 2,000 such sites populating the World Wide Web. Today, said, Shapira, MatchNet is the second largest dating site on the World Wide Web and the fastest growing one. He said JDate adds an average of 600 to 700 new members per day and projects that they will grow by 400 percent in the United States over the next five years. In 2003, he said, online communities and matchmaking services were among the highest earning services on the Internet, “after pornography and gambling.”
Shapira explained that his company is one of the ways that concerned people are trying to respond to what many consider a shocking demographic trend. He noted statistics that show the Jewish population, worldwide, is declining.
“JDate in our minds has a mission — to strengthen the Jewish community,” Shapira said. “It is legally owned by MatchNet, but it is morally owned by the Jewish people.”
Shapira also supports birthright israel, which funds and organizes group tours of Israel for young Jewish adults, and has sponsored the Israeli national flag football team for the last two years. He said they make charitable financial contributions “to thousands of Jewish organizations” and work with the Gift of Life National Bone Marrow Transplant Registry, which catalogues and tracks potential bone marrow donors — helping find matches among the limited populations of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.
“JDate,” he said, “encourages its members to register as donors and increase the representation of Jewish people in the bone-marrow donor pool.” Over 1,500 JDate members responded positively, he said. A JDate member was matched with a transplant patient last year, “and a life was saved.”
MatchNet also contributes to groups and projects outside the Jewish community. As one example, he said, JDate has committed to building libraries in two South Central Los Angeles elementary schools as part of an initiative sponsored by that city’s Jewish Federation.
“Judaism,” said Shapira, “is more than a religion. I believe it is a way of life.”