Orthodox Jewish Dating Sites

Exclusively Jewish. 3,630 Married & Counting. JWed is for Jewish, marriage-minded singles only. JWed is for Jewish singles who meet selective criteria. We look for:. From mother's side or completed conversion. Proselytizers from Jews for Jesus (or similar) not welcome. Civil and/or Jewish divorce (get) required if applicable. Orthodox millennial couple Yossi and Shira Teichman created Forj as the Jewish dating app for serious daters. As the first dating app fully powered by A.I., Forj is described by the Teichmans as.

• Orthodox Jewish Dating Websites
• Free Jewish Dating Sites
• Orthodox Dating Websites
• Orthodox Jewish Websites

Dating Sites for Orthodox Jews

The number of free Jewish dating sites online have exploded in recent years. There are sites for all ages and for all streams of Judaism. Orthodox Jewry is especially getting more and more familiar with the online dating scene.

Orthodate is a wonderful Orthodox Jewish dating site for religious Jewish singles. Orthodate was developed for the purpose of creating successful matches for Orthodox Jewish Singles all over the world. Their free membership option will allow those searching for marriage to post a profile, read incoming messages and reply using one of several pre-written responses. To send personal messages, it is necessary to upgrade to a paid plan. A percentage of all fees goes directly to tzedaka, or charity. All of the members on this site are part of Orthodox Jewry, and thus keep the laws of Shabbat and Kashrut.

Frumster is a great site for religious Jewish singles. They offer a free trial and a paid version of this Orthodox Jewish dating site. The free trial allows users to join Frumster, conduct searches and be listed in searches. There have been nearly 2,000 successful matches made on Frumster, and paid users have access to e-mail, IM and a forum. Requirements for joining is to be legally unmarried, have a complete, universally accepted conversion and to ideally keep Shabbat and Kashrut, though any Jewish person may join.

Jewish Soul Search is a completely free dating site for Jews in US, UK, Canada and Israel. There is no charge for reading or sending messages; everything is free thanks to those who sponsor the site. Jewish Soul Search was started by a couple who met on a free site years ago and decided to help others by starting such a site themselves. This site has always been free and the owners intend for it to remain so. There are a few other sites that are completely free.

No list of free Jewish dating sites would be complete without mentioning Jdate, the largest and most popular Jewish dating service online. Jdate has been around for over 10 years and is the premiere free Jewish dating sites available. Jdate is not exclusively for religious Jewish singles, but is open to Jews all over the world who feel that it is important to marry within their faith and build Jewish families. Success stories have been featured in the Washington Post, People Magazine, the Jewish Journal and ABC News. Jdate offers to their members in-depth profiles, photos, a 'favorites' list, e-cards, message boards, instant messaging, a 'secret admirer' feature and an advanced search.

When using free Jewish dating sites, it's important to remember some basic etiquette for success. Using a reputable site that doesn't allow for profanity and does allow for some basic confidentiality will make any online dating experience much safer. It's vital to be honest with profile details and photos. Sending personalized emails to potential matches is also a good idea, as people tend to realize when they are receiving a pre-written email. It's also important to be polite and to remember that there is another, actual person sitting on the other end of all of those computer wires. Complete a profile that is eye catching and has no spelling errors and have a good attitude. These sites generally do not conduct background searches on members, so a user's safety is in his or her own hands.

Have a question, on Orthodox Jewish Matters? Need an answer? Please Email your questions, Chava will answer your questions with insight and wit.

Return to Religious Jewish Singles- Home

Brooke, 30, an Orthodox woman divorced for six years, wants a meaningful relationship that will lead to marriage, but that is proving to be a challenge. She has tried matchmakers, popular in her circle, but most of them don’t give thought to the matches, ignoring her personal qualities and tastes. She’s tried Jewish dating sites too. But, she finds them “free for all and creepy.” Many of the men want to date casually, or just hook up. Some even create fake profiles.

In 2018, being Orthodox no longer offers the security of ongoing community support, and for single millennials, finding a partner is a solitary pursuit. While Jewish communities still value marriage and family above all, the burden of coupling falls on the singles.Yossi, 32, and Shira Teichman, 31, a married Orthodox couple from Los Angeles have drawn on their life experiences to create a technological solution to this dilemma. Together with life coach Shiffy,Lichtenstein, they are the co-creators of forJe a dating app for Jewish singles, like Brooke, who are seeking long-term relationships.

Chaim Orzel, 27, who grew up in a “very Orthodox home” and now describes himself as “Conservadox”, is ready to give the new app a try. He bemoans the shallowness of dating sites that promote pretty profiles and impressive job titles over internal gifts. “The problem is that it’s making marriage a transactional experience. What happens if a guy loses his job, or he has a stroke, heaven forbid? External things won’t keep a marriage together.”

The Teichmans share this view. “We both have PHDs in dating,” says Shira wearily, in a telephone interview with this reporter. Before meeting one another in 2014, she says: “We had gone to all the matchmakers and the singles events. We were meeting a multitude of people, but nothing was working.” Yossi recalls that most dating coaches just gave advice on appearances.

The disappointment led Shira, who has an MA in education, to study with experts such as Leonard Carr, a psychologist who runs growth courses on relationships and “personal mastery” [https://www.leonardcarr.com/index.html], hoping to better understand herself. “I wanted to understand what drives me, what holds me back. Once I started understanding myself, I realized my dating was changing already. I was in a more powerful position to find the right partner.”

Shira decided to share this new sense of power and began running dating workshops called “Breakthrough Dating.” “Being able to develop a connection is a very tangible skill,” she explains. While Shira says many millennials will go on a date, not feel “a spark”, and then end the budding relationship, she believes they need to learn a process she calls “the anatomy of building a relationship.”

Positive feedback followed the early events. Out of 40 individuals at one of her first events, four ended up getting married. So, when Yossi entered the picture, the workshops became a shared passion. After each event, the couple would distribute surveys, later reviewed by psychologist Rabbi David Pelcovitz, chair of education and psychology at Yeshiva University.

Statistics in hand, a year and a half ago, the couple began serious work on forJe. Yossi worked with a team of other programmers to code what he calls “the first dating app to use Artificial Intelligence.” To screen out fraudsters, the app requires users to scan their drivers’ license. That information is then compared to the information provided from Facebook or Google when the user makes a profile. Once the app is satisfied that the individual is not a scammer, personal information is deleted and never shared, Yossi says.

Orthodox Jewish Dating Websites

The need for such a high level of user safety is the result of an increase in catfishing, or the act of luring someone into a relationship based on a false online persona. Since 2005, numerous websites like romancescams.org and Facebook forums have been created to help victims of these crimes. In the last six months of 2014 alone, the FBI reported that 82 million dollars of money was stolen through such scams, as reported by the podcast Criminal.

Ben Rabizadeh, the CEO of JWed, a Jewish dating site in which over 50% of users are Orthodox, said that his site faces threats from these international scammers. Fraudsters create fake profiles, get into an online relationship, and then ask for money. “We screen out a large majority of fraudulent profiles during initial signup; but occasionally something slips through and in those cases, we promptly respond to complaints and remove users who are not eligible to join JWed.”

ForJe’s decision to increase security is also a response to locals who lie about their marital status on Jewish dating sites. Rabizadeh says he is shocked to hear of religious married men saying they are single to pursue single women. “This has never come up except for the rare circumstance where a couple is separated and not yet legally divorced.”

But women interviewed for this article say it does happen. Brooke describes her worst experience – a man who created four different profiles and even changed the cadence of his voice when speaking on the phone as the various personas. “He also had a wife and girlfriend,” she added. “There are men who are married or in relationships and lie about their status,” says Jackie, 32, who acknowledges that she finds dating sites helpful, despite the perils.

ForJe is taking these reports seriously. And the next step in creating a profile is also aimed at screening out fraudsters. Users must answer a lengthy series of multiple choice questions. The type of questions reflects the Teichmans’ interest in self-knowledge and include probing queries such as “If you won a large sum of money, how would you use it?” and “How do you determine if you’ve had a good week?” The list takes a while to get through, but the time required has an objective, according to Yossi. “We want to weed out people that are just looking for hook-ups,” he says emphatically.

Free Jewish Dating Sites

Orthodox Dating Websites

As users answer more questions and interact with the app, it is programmed to get to know their unique selves – at least as well as a machine can ‘know’ a human. Every day, users are presented with up to three matches. The low number of potentials is also there to encourage committed dating. There is no opportunity for rapidly judging the attractiveness of scores of photographs, a practice associated with other apps.“

Most dating apps today are not really dating apps. They are social media platforms and have all the features Facebook does. They just want people to be addicted and stay in. We aren’t interested in that. We are interested in you finding compatible matches.”But will singles trust a machine to set them up?

Jackie, who describes herself as Jewishly “traditional”, says she would give the concept a try. “Seems like anything would be better than the matchmakers at Saw You at Sinai,” she says, naming a popular Orthodox site which uses remote matchmakers to set users up. “Machines aren’t focused on what they get out of it, so that would probably be more accurate matching,” agrees Brooke, referring to matchmakers in general.

The app is potentially great news, according to Rabbi Mark Wildes, an Orthodox rabbi who founded and directs the Manhattan Jewish Experience, an organization where millennial men and women in their 20s and 30s can explore Jewish life and meet new people. “Any kind of technology that allows people to be more honest will be helpful to more serious-minded daters.” he says. However, he cautions that young people overuse technology for dating – breaking up over text and not giving shy people a chance. “People are not as fast as computers,” he says.

Another challenge he has observed is that millennials have lost their faith in marriage. When it comes to the challenges faced by Orthodox singles, Rabbi Wildes thinks the answer may lie in grassroots matchmaking. “It should be a mandate for every young couple in the first 24 months of their marriage to fix people up. We need to increase the pool of matchmakers. Feeling a little gratitude that you found that special someone? Pay it back.”

But while Jewish singles wait for their married friends to set them up, they are finding ways to empower themselves. Signing up for an artificially intelligent matchmaker is one way to do that.

Another form of empowerment is taking a chance on love, says Orzel. He believes the Orthodox single crisis can be solved by a collective change in attitude. “In Hebrew ahava means love, the root word, hav in Hebrew is to give. So, to love someone, you must give to that person. Without giving, there is no love. In our dating life today, there is no concept of unconditional love.”

Orthodox Jewish Websites

Suzanne Selengut writes feature stories about global Jewish issues and the arts. She is based in New York City.