"You pick the place, I'll pick the day," suggested Leah Hakimian as we arranged an interview. "That's how I do it with my clients."
     Get them started on compromise from Day 1 - when your career is helping people build relationships, it makes good sense, and Hakimian, former math instructor and current professional matchmaker, seems to personify a spirit of bringing different styles into harmony. Friendly and informal in her mannerisms and speech, she is nonetheless impeccably organized, having graced even our modest interview with copious notes on the subject of her own past, her matchmaking company Scopus, even on the matchmaking industry itself.
     Professionally and personally, it is a good time for Hakimian right now, having recently celebrated not only the birth of her eighth grandchild, but her own 40th wedding anniversary. Add this to her three happily married daughters (and a fourth engaged to be married), and she seems to be the natural person to consult on the building of successful relationships.
     It didn't take long for someone to catch on to this idea in her former home town of St. Louis, Missouri, and when the Jewish community there decided to open a Jewish matchmaking service, they called upon Hakimian to build it.
     "I had a good name - trustworthy, credible - and when they asked me, I immediately said yes," recalls Hakimian.
     The experience she garnered there quickly changed the focus of her professional life from education (in which she holds a Ph.D. from St. Louis University) to matchmaking. When she made aliya at the end of 1998, she quickly set up Scopus, the Jerusalem-based matchmaking program "open to persons 20-45 on all points of the Jewish observance spectrum." The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

"PEOPLE ASK me: 'Why should I join a matchmaking program?'" says Hakimian. "Well, why not?"
     One reason that shouldn't bother most potential users is the cost - for, unlike some of her American counterparts which have earned questionable reputations but charge $10,000 per session, Scopus is a non-profit organization. This is both the key to its success and to its claim to being not just a program for Jews, but a Jewish program in its own right.
     "I'll tell you what I think is uniquely Jewish about it," she says. "Money-matchmaking for profit isn't an especially Jewish thing, but community-funded, non-profit matchmaking to help Jewish people come together in marriage is a very Jewish idea, and there should be more funding for it."
     Matchmaking is an ancient tradition, especially among small, isolated communities like those of the Eastern European shtetl, where the key to survival was tight social cohesion. In many ways, Hakimian is the modern-day inheritor of the generations-old role of the shadchan. She uses matchmaking common sense culled from past centuries in her modern-day work, but although Jewish society has changed radically during its recent history, she doesn't see any reason why matchmaking shouldn't be adaptable to modern times.
     "People think, 'Matchmaking in the 21st century? Ha!'" says Hakimian. "But when you think about it, it's a service economy - people want what they want, when they want it. It's the reason that we have hotel concierges - people just like to have things done for them."
     Hakimian is still very much the educator, looking at matchmaking almost like an academic discipline. She has extensively researched the subject, both past and present, and her predominant ambition is to launch a comprehensive study of the field - something she claims has never been done. "Right now, I'd like to go into some proper research on the field, if the funding were available," she says. "Finding the funding for a study like that is the main thing right now."
     Joining up with Scopus is simple - you fill out a questionnaire and pay a one-time fee of NIS 200, after which you are in the system indefinitely. The Scopus clientele base is relatively small - currently some 400 participants - but it allows Hakimian to take a more personal role with her clients, who hail from all walks of Jewish life, religious and secular, Diaspora and Israeli. She has even made a number of international matches recently, although "we haven't had any home runs from that group yet," admits Hakimian with a laugh - a home run in Hakimian's parlance being a match that ends in a marriage, always the ultimate goal of Scopus.
     Although she has seen comparatively few marriages, with 12 couples married through Scopus since the service's inception, that is still a successful match for 1.7% of all users, a "batting average" significantly higher than most dating services claim. Batting .017 wouldn't be much to brag about in baseball, but, as Hakimian readily admits, whether people meet by themselves or through a service, "most people just don't end up getting married."

IT'S IRONIC that, while Scopus hasn't made any international matches yet, Hakimian's own marriage is with Yusuf Hakimian, an Iranian Jew with whom she spent a year in Iran during happier times that, in today's Middle East, sound almost like science-fiction.
     "Iran was beautiful back then," she recalls of the Iran she remembers from 1961. "Why, there were so many Israelis there, the government here actually opened up a school system for them!"
     After they moved to St. Louis, the couple were highly active and respected in the city's Jewish community. Both were active in more American Jewish organizations than one could shake a stick at, but Hakimian, a veteran traveler, hasn't found any trouble picking up and moving - one of the keys to her matchmaking success. "I'm comfortable in Jerusalem, New York, St. Louis, with Iranian communities, American communities... I'm just meeting people wherever I am... but Jerusalem is home now."
     Her new home in Israel includes her four daughters, one of whose husbands Hakimian's matchmaking skills ingeniously helped her daughter to meet. "[She and I] joked that we were going to run a service," recalls Hakimian. "You tell us who you want to meet, and we'll figure out how to do it."
     And her other daughters? Did she have a hand in their relationships?
     "No way," she laughs at the idea. "They did it entirely on their own."
     Well, you can't match 'em all.