By Rabbi Yair Hoffman
Recently, this author came across a mechaneches in California with the title of “Director of Student Success.” The benefits of such a position are abundantly clear and every Yeshiva high school and Beis Yaakov should perhaps consider creating such a position — along with clear goals and a metric to analyze its success. When a student is struggling — academically, socially, or emotionally — there should be someone whose entire job is to make sure that that student does not fall through the cracks.
Subsequently, someone sent me a research study on singles in the Chareidi world — conducted by Dr. Sima Zalcberg-Block of Ariel University — and the connection became immediately apparent. We need a Director of Singles Success as well.
In every community. It is the modern day fulfillment of v’Ahavta l’rayacha kamocha.
The study interviewed thirty Chareidi women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-six in Israel. What emerged was a portrait of resilience — and of inadvertent neglect.
These women are navigating crushing loneliness, family pressure, complicated feelings toward the Ribono Shel Olam, a bit of stigma in their communities, and the absence of any institutional support structure designed to address their specific situation.
I once spoke with Rav Yaakov Reisman shlita, the son-in-law of Rav Mordechai Gifterz t”l about an individual in the Far Rockaway community. Rav Reisman remarked that this individual exhibited a remarkable sense of acharayus – responsibility for others. He said that it is a rare midah, sadly, and one that everyone should emulate. He was absolutely right.
We can do better. And we must.
The Problem in Our Communities
In Chareidi and broader Orthodox society — both in Israel and in America — marriage is not merely a personal milestone. It is understood as a religious imperative and the foundation of a Torah life. Girls are raised from childhood with the expectation that their primary role will be as a wife and mother. Boys are told that building a bayis ne’eman b’Yisroel is among the highest callings available to them.
This is not wrong. It is, in fact, a beautiful and true reflection of Torah values. But what happens when, despite every effort, a person has not yet found his or her zivug? What systems does our community have in place to support that person?
In many communities, the honest answer is: nada – nothing. Or at best, very little.
The study documents what many of us already know anecdotally. Singles, both men and women, face layered, compounding challenges:
- loneliness that intensifies as friends marry and drift away;
- the anguish of watching younger siblings approach marriageable age;
- the subtle — and sometimes not so subtle — pity of neighbors and relatives;
- the physical and emotional deprivation that comes from years of enforced isolation
- and the devastating feeling that the community’s institutions simply were not designed with them in mind.
The researcher coined the term “embodied deprivation” to describe the cumulative effect of years of the isolation. The loneliness seems to reshape or further highlight how a person relates to others, how comfortable she feels in social settings, and even how she behaves on dates — sometimes causing the very awkwardness that leads to a shidduch not working out. It is a cycle, and, sadly, no one in a position of communal authority is taking meaningful steps to break it.
What a Director of Singles Success Should Do
Every Orthodox community of significant size should appoint a Director of Singles Success — a dedicated professional whose sole mandate is the welfare and advancement of unmarried community members.
This is distinct from a shadchan, and the distinction matters.
A shadchan’s job is to make matches. The Director of Singles Success’s job is to make sure that every single person in the community is thriving — supported, informed, dignified, and never invisible.
Here is what that position should encompass:
1. Connecting Singles to Mental Health Support
The study found that therapy was one of the most powerful coping tools available to single women — but that stigma, cost, and lack of information kept many from accessing it. In our community, the same barriers exist. The Director of Singles Success should maintain a vetted list of capable people and or therapists who are both frum and professionally trained, who understand the specific pressures of the shidduch world, and who will not make a single person feel that something is fundamentally broken about them.
The Director should actively and warmly encourage singles to avail themselves of this support — normalizing it, destigmatizing it, and where possible, helping to make it financially accessible.
2. Educating Families on How to Help — and How Not to Hurt
The study found that parents, despite loving their children deeply, were often an unfortunate and inadvertant significant source of pain. Examples abound: The worried look after every failed date. The pressure around a younger sibling’s shidduch. The unspoken message that until marriage, something essential is missing. These communications are of course unintentional — but are devastating nonetheless.
Even the joy that families experience when their married son and dil just got back for Yom Tov travelling 30 hours through Egypt can make the single child feel so judged and rejected.
The Director of Singles Success should offer workshops, shiurim, and one-on-one guidance for families of older singles. The message is how to be a source of chizuk rather than an additional weight to carry. Here is how to be the one place your child can come home to and breathe.
3. Building and Supporting Peer Networks
One of the most striking findings of the study was the organic power of community. The women who fared best were those who had formed close friendships with other singles — whether in shared apartments, through college, or through WhatsApp groups that they themselves created. These networks gave them a sense of belonging, practical information, and the knowledge that they were not alone. We should perhaps look at WhatsApp groups as a vehicle for v’ahavta laraycha kamocha – rather than an evil scourge of humanity.
The Director of Singles Success should facilitate and support these networks — organizing Shabbos and Yom Tov gatherings so that no single person is sitting alone at a table designed for a family, creating ongoing social programming, and ensuring that the singles of the community see themselves as a kehillah within the kehillah rather than as an afterthought.
4. Reforming and Supplementing the Shidduch Process
The traditional shadchan system, whatever its merits, is not sufficient. The study documents women who felt entirely dependent on unreliable and sometimes costly middlemen, with no ability to advocate for themselves or access alternatives. In response, many formed their own WhatsApp dating networks — and found them genuinely helpful. The Director of Singles Success should help coordinate and expand such initiatives, bringing them under a more organized communal framework while preserving their grassroots character.
Additionally, the Director should work directly with shadchanim in the community — not to replace them, but to ensure better coordination, accountability, and follow-through. How many shidduchim have fallen apart not because of incompatibility but because of poor communication, lost leads, or a shadchan stretched too thin? A centralized communal resource can help.
5. Providing Critical Information on Fertility Preservation
This is a topic that is almost entirely absent from communal discourse — and the silence is causing real harm. A woman who marries at thirty-four or thirty-eight faces a very different fertility reality than one who marries at twenty-two. She deserves to have this information, to understand her options, and to make informed decisions in accordance with halacha and da’as Torah.
The study found that some women organized their own informational sessions on egg freezing because no one else was doing it. The Director of Singles Success should take ownership of this area — consulting with poskim to ensure that the information provided is halachically grounded, and working with medical professionals to make it accessible and understandable.
A woman should not have to find out about these options on her own, when it may already be too late.
6. Protecting the Dignity of Singles in Communal Life
The language that we use to describe singles in the community must change. The researcher notes that a prominent rabbi referred to unmarried women as “unfortunate ones” who needed to be “rescued.” This kind of language — however well-intentioned — compounds the pain rather than alleviating it. It communicates that the single person’s value is conditional on their marital status.
The Director of Singles Success should work with rabbanim, community leaders, and mechanchim to shift this paradigm. A single person in their late twenties or thirties who is working, growing, contributing to the community, and maintaining their Torah observance under difficult circumstances is not and should not be an object of pity. They are a model of emunah and strength. Our language and communal culture should reflect that. It should be no different than the imahos who were barren precisely because Hashem wanted their closer relationship. I know a major Talmid Chochom who couldn’t get a deserved position as a Rosh Yeshiva because he was single.
What Success Looks Like: Metrics That Matter
Any serious position requires measurable goals. Here is what the Director of Singles Success chould be tracking:
- Percentage of singles in the community who are connected to at least one form of ongoing support — a therapist, a peer group, or a communal program.
- Number of singles receiving active shidduch assistance — not just names in a database, but meaningful, follow-through engagement.
- Rate of retention of singles within Torah observance and within the community. Yetzias ha-community is a crisis that does not announce itself.
- Number of family education sessions conducted annually.
- Subjective wellbeing data — through annual anonymous surveys — asking singles how supported, seen, and dignified they feel within the community.
A Torah Imperative
The Chofetz Chaim writes that the mitzvah of v’ahavta l’rei’acha kamocha — loving one’s neighbor as oneself — requires us to feel another’s pain as if it were our own and to act accordingly. This is actually an obligation.
The women described in this study were davening, struggling, growing, and maintaining their emunah under conditions of real suffering. Many of them felt invisible to their community’s institutions. That invisibility is a communal failure — one we have both the ability and the responsibility to correct.
The shidduch crisis is not only a crisis of matches unmade. It is a crisis of people unsupported. Creating a Director of Singles Success does not solve the underlying problem of why so many people are unmarried — that is a larger conversation for another time. But it creates a communal infrastructure that says clearly: you are seen, you matter, and we are not going to leave you to navigate this alone.
Every Yeshiva and Beis Yaakov should have a Director of Student Success. And every Orthodox community should have a Director of Singles Success. The position of the California mechaneches and the suffering of the Chareidi women are telling us the same thing: dedicated, professional, compassionate support structures save people. It is time to build them.
The author can be reached at [email protected].