When the JC played cupid: How three couples found their soulmates via JC adverts

It all started with an advert in the Jewish Chronicle.

Such is the common introduction to the love stories belonging to a number of once-lovelorn JC readers, who found their beshert in the pages of this very publication. Thanks to the JC’s erstwhile advert section, where readers could appeal to the community to fulfil matters of the heart, these three fortune-favoured couples met and built their lives together. Today, they’ve returned to the JC to tell their stories.

Karen and Neil

Placing an advert in the paper was something of a last resort for Karen Sloam, or so she thought at 35 years old.

“All my friends were engaged or married,” said Karen, now 63. “I thought, ‘what do I do?’ So I wrote an ad for the JC – I was hoping to meet someone who I would fall in love with and marry, and it was important that he be Jewish.”

Karen’s advert elicited numerous responses. The most important one, however, came from Neil.

“I was living in Milton Keynes, not a very Jewish area, and I wanted to meet someone who was Jewish,” said Neil, an estate agent. “This seemed to be the easiest way at the time; you either went to a weird nightclub or you used the JC. And with Karen, we spoke on the phone for over an hour on our first call before we met in person. I think we spoke three or four times before we met and every time it was for ages, so we kind of knew we’d get on.”

For Karen, who works at a primary school, Neil was already ahead of his fellow suitors because he “was the only one who took me out for a meal”, she said.

On their first date, the pair met at a restaurant in Edgware for dinner before going to the cinema where, according to Neil, Karen fell asleep. Even so, that first impression sealed the deal.

“He was handsome and had lovely blue eyes,” Karen said. “He was very kind, he made me laugh, and he was very easy to talk to.”

Karen and Neil on their wedding day in 1999.[Missing Credit]

As for Neil, he was smitten enough to turn down centre court tickets to the Wimbledon finals to go on a second date with her. “I’ve never got centre court Wimbledon tickets since,” he said.

Neil, who was married once before, told Karen “quite early on” that he wasn’t able to have children.

“My mum asked me, ‘Do you really want to go into a relationship with someone who can’t have children?’” Karen said. “But I told my mum, ‘I love him’, and I wanted to be with him anyway.”

The Shenley-based couple married two years after meeting and, despite struggling with various fertility options, they eventually adopted their son Max, now 19, from Russia, and have raised him in the Jewish faith.

This year, Neil and Karen celebrated their 26th wedding anniversary.

Karen and Neil pictured in 2024.[Missing Credit]

Steven and Sandra

The only words Steven Marcus remembers from the 1987 “Lonely Hearts” advert his future-wife Sandra placed in the JC were “attractive female.”

“I had just come out of a marriage – my first wife wasn’t Jewish and I thought if I was to marry again, I’d want to marry a Jewish girl this time around,” said Steven, 68. “So she put this ad in and my mother saw it, gave it to me, and I sent a letter to a PO box – there was no internet, no email then, and not even a phone number.”

Sandra received some 50 responses to her advert, but Steven said she picked him out of the bunch for two reasons: “One, I didn’t send a photo, and two, I’d been married before and she reckoned, ‘he must be OK if he’s been married before.’”

For their first date, Steven and Sandra met at a pub in Walthamstow, near where Sandra lived. “We got on very well,” Steven said. “I thought she was very nice: good personality, good looks, everything. I don’t think she was that impressed with me, honestly – I don’t think she thought I was very fancy-able. But I charmed her with my conversational skills.”

A first date turned into a second, and then a third. Two years after they started dating, Sandra and Steven married in a “big Jewish wedding”.

Steven and Sandra pictured on their wedding day.[Missing Credit]

“I think our shared cultural background played a massive role in our connection,” Steven said. “I think it’s better to marry someone Jewish if you’re Jewish. I’m not religious, neither of us are religious, but we have a cultural identity.

“With my first wife not being Jewish, it was a cultural mismatch. There are a lot of interfaith marriages that do succeed but I really thought I’d have a better chance of success with someone who was Jewish like me.” Thirty-nine years later, Steven and Sandra have two children and one 12-week-old grandchild.

“It’s all a question of fate, that my mum saw the advert and Sandra responded to my letter,” Steven said. “My two children and grandchildren wouldn’t be here without that.”

Steven and Sandra.[Missing Credit]

Linda and Martin

Linda Lewis’s love story also came about thanks to some parental encouragement. She was inspired to place an advert in the JC after her father, having lost two former partners to cancer, found extraordinary success in his search for companionship via the JC. According to Linda, her father’s advert garnered over 100 responses.

“He narrowed it down to ten, met three, and married one of them,” Linda said. “So him having had this amazing situation, I thought I’d give it a try myself.”

Linda, then 42 and recently divorced, put an advert of her own in the JC in 1997, describing herself as “a typical female Aries”. Her message caught the eye of one Martin Lewis.

“The reason I replied to Linda’s advert was because I’m an Aries too,” said Martin, also divorced and the father of two children from his previous marriage. “In fact, our birthdays are four days apart in the same year – we both just celebrated our 70th birthdays in April – so, while I didn’t quite know what a typical female Aries was, I thought I’d reply.”

Linda and Martin pictured on their first date.[Missing Credit]

For their first date, Martin asked Linda to come over for dinner. But Linda, wanting to “check what he was like”, decided to pay Martin an impromptu visit at his home the night before. Though she caught him unawares, Linda said she knew then that he was “just right.”

“As soon as I met him, I knew he was the one. It was love at first sight,” she said.

But their meeting wasn’t quite “first sight”. The pair had seen each other before; one of Linda’s four daughters from her previous marriage was in the same class at JFS as Martin’s son, not to mention Martin owned a delicatessen where Linda used to shop. “My son went to her daughter’s bat mitzvah the year before we met, but we were both still married,” Martin said. “So it wasn’t love at first sight, but things grow on you, and I fell in love with her.”

Despite both pledging early on that “under no circumstances were we going to get married again,” Linda and Martin tied the knot at South Hampstead Synagogue in 2000, thereafter merging their six children for Jewish holidays and Friday-night dinners to come.

The couple now have 11 grandchildren and live in Israel after making aliyah three years ago. Approaching their silver anniversary this year, Linda and Martin reflected gratefully that, though they vaguely knew one another before dating, they “never would’ve got together without that JC ad”.

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If you would like to go on blind date courtesy of the Jewish Chronicle, please email Karen Glaser on: blinddate@thejc.com t t