Hello and thank you for downloading the Witness Podcast from the BBC World Service, history told by the people who were there.

Every day this week we're looking at love and marriage around the world.

I'm Lucy Burns and today we're going back to the birth of a and have people other people

start using a name that you came up with, what second? That's my's mine. I just I made that program up.

Yakov Dayo is a rabbi and he came up with the idea for speed dating in

1998 when he had just gone to work in Los Angeles.

So I was like a newly minted rabbi type guy who just came out of Jerusalem to work for an

organization called Aeshaora, to engage Jewish people to connect to their

heritage.

So in the course of that, I'd had some classes going on and we'd have socials in the synagogue, oh what fun. And it is, it did have that

stale feel. I could feel it. One of the ideas that Yakov and his students were discussing was how to help people in the community meet each other.

They started brainstorming ways to make traditional matchmaking more appealing.

I said, well, why are we use name speed dating people can sit

down next to each other for a minute a moment of time and they can have like these

old Victorian dance cards so what happens is that we've kind of practiced ourselves a little bit and then we just sort of went for it.

We got an email for one of the students.

Asked me have a coffee

house one second here I don't know if we're ready here he said no and we can do it so the people came, the four or five people in the group, they organized their

friends and it was all just friends, there was no expectation, but there was a lot of

anticipation, there was a lot of like fun in the year. The venue for that first event was Pete's coffee house in Beverly Hills.

It's right near the hub of everything.

All the cool people go.

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