Community-conscious grassroots initiatives are quietly breaking the shidduch bottleneck

Few parents are spared the labyrinth of phone calls, emails, string-pulling and stress that defines today’s shidduch system. For many, the process stretches on year after anxious year, as they and their children soldier on, wondering what more they can do to finally reach the other side.

Navigating the shidduch scene may never become a walk in the park. Still, that doesn’t mean that the determined, home-grown efforts of a few can’t make a seismic difference. In recent years, a number of grassroots initiatives have quietly taken shape  — and now they’re seeing real results. 

Nothing Was Working

SIMCHASEINU

Innovator: Shloime Newhouse

Established: 2022

“We’ve built an infrastructure to accommodate our burgeoning needs, but when it comes to shidduchim, we’re still relying on the same handful of well-known shadchanim, and they simply can’t handle the volume”

IT

was a cool Friday night, and Shloime Newhouse, a Lakewood bochur, was walking home after having joined one of his married siblings for the seudah. They were really nice, but still, as the leaves crunched under his feet, his mind swirled along with the autumn gusts. How many more one-and-done dates would he have to sit through? When would Hashem split the sea for him, too?

For some time, Shloime had been active in trying to find shidduchim for others and had even racked up an impressive list of successful suggestions that led to l’chayims. He had developed relationships with the big shadchanim in the region, chatting with them regularly and throwing his ideas at them whenever a good one came to mind. But when it came to his own shidduchim, nothing seemed to work.

That’s when he decided it was time to bring to life an idea his mother had been nurturing for years. Mrs. Devora Newhouse, the secretary at Shiras Devorah High School in Lakewood, spent her days interacting with students, and had long noticed the meaningful bonds they often formed with their teachers. Those relationships, she realized, were an untapped resource in the world of shidduchim. Why do we always run to these overburdened shadchanim? she thought. Why not the teachers?

“They just don’t see themselves as shadchanim, so they don’t think of ideas,” she would tell herself. “But if we could get them involved, they would notice every nephew or neighbor that was in the parshah and start redting them to their former students.”

Mrs. Newhouse also observed that teachers were already investing significant time passing along shidduch information. Given these teachers’ firsthand knowledge of their students, she believed they were uniquely positioned to offer more focused — and ultimately more successful — suggestions, especially if they were incentivized.

“We could create an army of shadchanim,” she would say, although the idea never moved beyond the realm of conversation.

Until that Shabbos.

When Shloime came home, he turned to his mother with quiet conviction and told her, “Mommy, I’m going to make your initiative a reality — and may it be a zechus for me to find the right one soon.”

Shloime got to work immediately after Shabbos, and with the help of his sister Chaya Miriam Weiss, the concept quickly took shape.

Less than a week later, Shloime was redt to his future wife, Chaya Bracha Hirsch.

And just a few months into their shanah rishonah, Shloime and his wife had Simchaseinu up and running.