Today they’re household names, but it started with a leap of faith: "Rabbi Noach Weinberg was always excited about using technology for kiruv, and he wanted to make this happen"

In 1995, I was living in Los Angeles and teaching in the city’s Aish Hatorah branch. This was at the dawn of the Internet, and we created an Aish L.A. website to reach out locally. At the same time, the people at Aish in Jerusalem were also trying to get something off the ground and onto the web.

Rabbi Noach Weinberg was always excited about using technology for kiruv, and he wanted to make this happen. Aware of my background in journalism and marketing — I have a degree from the University of Texas’s school of journalism — he called me one day in 1997, and asked me to come back to Jerusalem. My job would be to take the nascent Aish website and turn it into an Internet leader in Jewish education.