By Yosef Shidler

I’m probably as skeptical as the next person when I hear that something is a segulah for something. And people who have been trying to have children are certainly tired of everyone telling them to try this segulah or that one.

Days before October 7th, I had a simple idea: connect shluchim who could use a few extra dollars with people who might want to buy a Chosson Torah.

I have a personal stake in it. I am the product of a Chosson Torah bought off a shliach and paid off over the course of a year. The week after I finished paying it off, I met my wife. We were engaged a short time later. Other segulos were at play in my life too, and it felt like everything came together at once — but the timing was more than chilling.

So twelve years into my marriage I started offering to do the same for other people. Let the shluchim make a few dollars. We ran it days before October 7th, entirely on WhatsApp and Instagram. I did it manually for thirty or forty shluchim, and even as I was going into Yom Tov, people were still messaging me. It would have been a very interesting conversation to keep having. October 7th overshadowed it, and I forgot about the whole thing.

Then, over the course of that year, stories started finding their way back to me. A lot of the people who had taken a Chosson Torah — many of them single for a long time — were now engaged.

That got my attention. In 2024 we launched it as a real platform, together with DollarDaily.org, which I was already running.

In our first season we raised over $100,000 for shluchim in Tishrei. More meaningful than the number were the stories that came back through the year. Last season we more than doubled it: $217,000 raised for shluchim — and again, story after story of people who had seen real brachos.

Some for parnassa. Some for children. Many for shidduchim.

One of my favorites: a mother, not from our community, bought a kibud from a shliach. Mid-year her son took a vacation abroad, walked into a Chabad house for a Friday night dinner, and met a girl there. They’re married now. She supported a shliach, and the shidduch came through the very same path.

We’ve had people who took Maftir Chana and had children. We’ve had people who took Maftir Yonah and saw parnassa.

And I have also heard from plenty of people who saw no change at all. I got one of those messages today.

Here is what I wrote back. I think kibudim are like WD-40. They help things slide into place when everything is already ready to happen. I don’t think buying a Chosson Torah magically makes a shidduch, and I don’t think Maftir Yonah magically makes anyone rich. I think there are easier ways and harder ways, and maybe what a kibud does is let things slide into place without all the noise and the creaking.

I heard a story this year about a man whose house kept getting broken into. He asked the Rebbe, and the Rebbe told him to check his mezuzos. He checked them — and it happened again. This time the Rebbe told him to make sure he had a lock on the door.

Sometimes we have to build the keli for the bracha to come into. And if the keli is there and it’s meant to happen — I’m not a navi. I can’t tell you why it works one time and not another. I don’t have numbers on engagements. What I can tell you is that the stories are real enough, and that the thread running through them is hard to miss.

So I’m at it again.

Tishrei is one of the hardest months in a shliach’s year. The added expenses pile up fast. If you can take $180 or $360 off a shliach’s head — and certainly $750 or $1,000 — you’re helping him, you’re helping his family, and you’re helping a Jewish community somewhere that could probably use it. If it comes with added brachos on top of that, why not.

This season there are 202 kibudim listed on Kibid from Chabad houses around the world — from Traverse City, Michigan to Khmelnytskiy, Ukraine, near the Baal Shem Tov. Maftir on both days of Rosh Hashana, Maftir Yonah, Chosson Bereishis, pesicha, and more. Many open at $180.

And this year, it isn’t only for shluchim
Here is the part I most want people to read.

For three years this ran on Chabad houses. But the problem it solves was never only a shliach’s problem. Every shul in the world sells kibudim before Tishrei, and almost every one of them sells them the same way it did fifty years ago: a gabbai with a list, a room with whoever showed up, and a number that stops climbing the moment the last hand in the room goes down.

That number has almost nothing to do with what the kibud is worth. It has to do with who happened to be in shul that morning.

So this year we opened registration to private shuls. Any community — a shul, a minyan, a beis medrash, anywhere in the world, with or without a shliach — can now register on Kibid and sell its own kibudim to the whole world instead of to the twenty families in the room.

What that actually means for a shul:

It costs nothing to start. You list an honor and you see what happens.

Your Rosh Hashana maftir stops being worth what one room will pay for it. A person in another country who has been davening for a child for eleven years is looking for exactly that honor right now. He has no way to find your shul. This is the way he finds it.

I’d ask every gabbai and every shul president reading this to take ten minutes and register. Not because we need the shuls — because I’ve now watched three years of what happens when a kibud gets to reach past the four walls it’s sitting in, and I think most shuls have no idea what they’re leaving on the table.

Shuls and communities can register at dollardaily.org/kibid/community/register.

Looking forward to hearing your story from this Tishrei.

Browse this year’s kibudim at dollardaily.org/kibid.

Yosef Shidler is the director of Kibid and DollarDaily.org.