Editor

Go to shul, find your mate. That's the theory behind a new program offering at Ohev Sholom-The National Synagogue.

The first 40 singles to sign up for the initiative and attend the Orthodox District synagogue five times in a two-month period will get a free one-year membership to Saw You at Sinai, an online service that pairs personal matchmakers with daters.

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld conceived of the idea after a congregant ‹ who has volunteered as a matchmaker for Saw You at Sinai ‹ showed him a November item in WJW's Mishmash column. That blurb reported on a New Jersey rabbi who was offering his single congregants free membership on the online dating service, JDate.

"Of course, the rabbi being who he is picked up on this," says Ron Kleinfeldt, and found two (unnamed) sponsors to foot the bill for 40 people for a one-year Saw You at Sinai subscription. The synagogue got a discount, paying $100 per person instead of the standard $120.

Herzfeld sent a notice, listing Kleinfeldt as the contact, to his standard e-mail list on Wednesday morning of last week. By 3 p.m., Kleinfeldt reports, he already had heard from about 10 interested singles.

Both he and Herzfeld, who are searching for additional sponsorships, see a dual purpose in the offering. Not only do the two hope for some successful matches that will lead to the chuppah ‹ "I know a rabbi who can officiate at the wedding for no charge," Herzfeld wrote in his e-mail ‹ but they see it as a way to draw singles to Ohev Sholom, a synagogue whose membership had been dwindling until Herzfeld arrived in 2004.

Singles often feel uncomfortable coming to synagogue programs, which they perceive as family and couple oriented, both men say.

"I want singles to feel they have a home in our congregation," Herzfeld says. Thus, the requirement to attend shul (any event will do, not just services) five times in two months.

"We do feel we want you to take some action. If you come five times," there's some commitment, the rabbi says. "We hope it will create more of a singles community."

Plus, "we have to help them find their beloved who's out there waiting," he says.

The rabbi says he chose Saw You at Sinai, with its 25,000 members, rather than the more popular JDate, which boasts 650,000 members worldwide, because he'd heard too many stories about daters coming across non-Jews through the latter site.

Kleinfeldt also points out that Saw You at Sinai has a personal touch. Each person who registers chooses three matchmakers, who will filter through possible matches and send the member up to three profiles at a time. "People don't even know they were rejected," Kleinfeldt says.

While Saw You at Sinai (which takes its name from the tradition that every Jewish soul was at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah) tends to draw those who are, as Kleinfeldt puts it, "open Orthodox or modern Orthodox," the site's database cross matches with JRetroMatch.com, a service that claims 7,000 members, according to officials, and is geared toward the non-Orthodox.

Bethesda's Debra Kirsch, 49, was the first to contact Herzfeld, the third to e-mail Kleinfeldt.

She's excited about signing up for Saw You at Sinai, as she recently had been thinking of joining an online service, but was wary.

"I know people lie online," Kirsch says.

Still, just days before Herzfeld's e-mail went out, she had Shabbat dinner with a couple who had met through Saw You.

"Now, I'm hearing about it twice in one week," she remembered thinking when she got the e-mail, "and someone's sponsoring it."

She's hoping that with the personal attention she'll get from the matchmakers and from Kleinfeldt, a sales consultant who is going to help guide the Ohev Shalom singles on the site, she'll have some good luck.

"I go to so many Jewish things, it's insane I haven't met anyone," says Kirsch, the program assistant for the University of Maryland's Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies and Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies.

Plus, like Herzfeld and Kleinfeldt, she hopes that more singles will start coming to Ohev Sholom ‹ and perhaps, won't need an online service to find a match.