Spreading the Joy (Volume 2, March 2006)
By Leah Bollag
Leora ends every evening with a trip to her brother’s home in Maalot Dafna. To her, this visit is worth the cab fare from Har Nof and the risk she runs of breaking her seminary’s curfew. Unbeknownst to her brother, it is not her adorable nephew that brings her back night after night. Rather, it is the computer in the living room. Leora religiously visits but one website every night: onlysimchas.com.
She is not the only one. Each day, between 30,000 and 40,000 Jews wanting to catch up on the latest simcha reports log on to the website to read about various engagements, weddings, and births. Employees visit the site on their lunch breaks; students run to the computer lab between classes – or during. In fact, webmasters at largely Orthodox companies and schools such as IDT, YU and Stern College, have suggested that productivity might be boosted by blocking access to onlysimchas.com from their servers.
The addiction many have to this website is easy to understand. Everyone likes to be in on breaking news. Instead of relying on friends to provide updates on who became engaged or made aliyah, users can get their gossip on their own with the click of a mouse. This saves them the embarrassment of, for example, congratulating an acquaintance on his engagement when he already has two children. Seminary girls like Leora get the latest scoop while their American contacts are sound asleep several time zones away. They are also bearers of good news to their less fortunate friends, who lack internet access.
Of course, there is a downside to this rapid publication of simchas (joyous occasions). New baalei simcha have always felt pressured to let close family and friends in on the news before they hear it from someone else. An aunt is likely to feel hurt when hearing about her own niece’s engagement from her brother’s neighbor’s cousin before hearing from the niece herself. It was easier to refrain from offending one’s aunts when it took at least fifteen minutes for news to travel through the grapevine, giving the happy couple sufficient time to call all those who claim the right to hear of the engagement firsthand. But now, with the advent of onlysimchas.com, the time frame has shrunk to about the length of time during which eager friends can be held back from posting the exciting news for all to see – roughly fifteen seconds. However, judging from the dedicated following the site commands, most seem to agree that its benefits vastly outweigh any risk it poses to well-intentioned nieces.
Onlysimchas.com was founded after Dov Katz posted pictures of Yossi Markovitz’s vort on a website he was hosting. People soon began asking him to do the same for their simchas. Recognizing the tremendous potential of such a site, his friends Doron Katz and Mr. Markovitz suggested to Dov that they take it to the next level. “We ran around like madmen, taking pictures at people’s weddings – whether or not we were invited,” says Mr. Markovitz. Word of this new site spread within their circle of friends in New Jersey, then seeped out to neighboring Jewish communities. By the end of 2002, onlysimchas.com had snowballed into a global Jewish simcha network. People were announcing simchas online, and others across the globe were instantly viewing their galleries and posting their comments.
Then, because of the traffic, the site crashed. But instead of going down in cyber-history as another dot-com bust, onlysimchas.com was revived by its persistent founders and became the invaluable resource it is today. Encouraged by e-mails from supporters and publicized even further through press coverage of the crash, onlysimchas.com’s popularity and success has since increased tenfold. Now, an estimated 20,000,000 pages are viewed a month by more than 200,000 users.
Onlysimchas.com continues to develop and increase in popularity, as new features are continuously added. The advertisements which support the site are specifically targeted toward the Jewish community. Just about anything can be offered or requested in the classified section. And the newest feature, the “Press Portal,” will enable users to further publicize their simchas by forwarding them to any of several Jewish newspapers or to the Nachum Segal radio show. Aside from the original function of the site--to share one’s simcha with others instantaneously--onlysimchas.com serves other important purposes. “It’s brought the community closer,” Mr. Markovitz said. “It’s kind of introduced everybody to other communities in the world.” People discover various cultural similarities and differences between Jews all over. From Sao Paulo to New York to Venice to Melbourne, everyone celebrates engagements, weddings, and births, though sometimes in different ways. The website has also united people in the more conventional sense. Many former friends have rekindled their relationships after finding one another in a gallery and sending e-mails through the site. Previously unknown relatives were discovered in the same way. As Mr. Markovitz put it, “Everyone’s got their own onlysimchas story!”
A couple in England found onlysimchas.com helpful in a different way. A cab driver found a set of wedding proofs in the back of his car, with no apparent way to trace their owners. However, a Google search for their names returned their page on onlysimchas.com, and the proofs were returned. Though not the most apparent functions of the site, these aspects are in line with its founders’ aspirations. Their motto, Mr. Markovitz says, is “Uniting the Jewish world in celebration.”
May we all continue to share in only simchas!
