#602 Anat Maman (Kiryat Ono, Ramat Gan)
& Alex Fiedler (Jerusalem, Jerusalem)

Success Story

Their meeting was a collision of cultures. For their first date, Anat, a native Israeli, and Alex, an American originally from New Jersey, were to meet at a café in a city that they both had never been to before. Upon first meeting her Alex says Anat was everything he pictured that his future wife would be. Little did they expect, however, that both of them would get lost while trying to find one another, so they ended up meeting at a gas station and finding the café together afterwards. This proved to be most challenging part of their dating – due to their considerable distance from each other and the hectic commute, often the only time they would be able to see each other was on Motzai Shabbos. Despite this, they found the time commitment and effort to be worth it as they discovered they had common interests, goals, and religious beliefs. Into the fourth week of their courtship they were already discussing unofficially that knew that they wanted to get married. While enjoying a perfect March day with a picnic in the park, after dating for about two and a half months, Alex popped the question to her asking Anat unexpectedly “did you enjoy your last Sushi as a single woman?” Gleefully surprised, she said "yes, of course" – a few months later they were married on June 20, 2011. They both praise SYAS matchmaker Rivka Steinberg-Cowan for suggesting the match after coming across their profiles and for being as Alex describes “very dedicated and involved – she called us after every date to see how it went even though she wasn’t either of our appointed matchmaker!” Anat attributes her positive experience on SYAS because “SYAS is much more personal, its the ideal model for religious dating.” Alex adds that he had no previous hesitations to joining SYAS and also encourages other Jewish singles to sign up because “it is a cool use of modern technology to meet other people in the Torah way, old-school shadchanis with modern technology.”