Finding a nice Jewish neighborhood to live in can be a tricky process if you’re moving to a new city. Realtors might not be able to tell you if the house you are interested in is near a synagogue, if there are Jewish schools nearby, what sort of a community you are moving into or whether there is a community in the area.
HeimishHome.com, a new Web site that wants to be the one-stop shop for researching Jewish neighborhoods. Heimishhome has listings from realtors in different neighborhoods around America with special features that allow the users to check how close the house is to the nearest shul, school, kosher restaurant or mikvah. There are also editorials on the site that offer thumbnail descriptions of the different communities. Thinking of moving to Cherry Hill, N.J., but aren’t sure what awaits you there? Log on to Heimishhome, where you will find out that Cherry Hill “is blessed with all the necessities a Jewish family needs and enjoys a reputation for hospitality, warmth, and friendliness.”
Alon Tamir, a 22-year-old Australian Yeshiva University computer science graduate said he started the site after he got married and realized he had no idea which community he wanted to live in.
“Here you have an infinite number of choices, and I realized there was no one place you could go or one group of people you could speak to where you can find out about the community [and whether] it would be a place where you could feel comfortable about having a Jewish life,” he said.
Through his online connections, Tamir eventually decided that Teaneck, N.J., was the place for him.
Currently the site gets 150,000 hits a month and has about 300 listings, and it is slowly becoming a place where new communities or communities in need of revival can broadcast their wares to new customers.
Tamir envisions that it won’t be long before the site has thousands of listings from all over the world.
“People say to me, ‘How come no one ever thought of this before?'” Tamir said. “‘It makes our lives so much easier!'”
For more information log on to www.heimishhome.com .
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