The Jewish Yelp of Making a Simcha

Mazel tov! Your child just got engaged!

It’s the Three Weeks, so although there is a lull in the simcha calendar, you know that now is the prime time for you to seek out your hall, caterer, photographer, musician, and so on – before the summer concludes and the influx of invitations come rushing in with all good vendors already booked.

But what if this is your first time making a simcha, or maybe you recently moved to a new area, or haven’t made a simcha in a few years and don’t know which vendors are good and, perhaps more importantly, which to avoid.

Where do you turn to for advice?

Up until recently, you would be doing what baalei simchos have been doing for decades: spending hours on the phone talking and texting people that have recently made affairs and hearing all about their experiences. No doubt this resulted in having to devote hours of time listening to gossip about how this photographer made their mother-in-law look fat, how the caterer used cheap quality meat, making dishes salty and greasy, and how the band played music so loud that poor uncle Morty threw a fit and left the hall. All this is time consuming, sometimes counter-productive, and not always reliable and beneficial to your agenda.

When one needs to research a doctor, plumber, or business, many rely on Yelp or Google Reviews where they get to read first-hand accounts of whether this is a good business to hire. But the Jewish consumer, up until a few months ago, had to enter the simcha making arena blindly, oftentimes resulting in a waste of thousands of dollars.

For Texan-born Yisroel Perton, who now resides with his wife and kids in Fair Lawn, N.J., this scenario sounded absurd. A software engineer and program designer by trade, Perton was listening to the KosherMoney podcast one day and couldn’t fathom how all too often members of the Jewish community go into debt spending thousands of dollars making parties, when they should be able to access a collective database like Yelp that relies on crowd-sharing to confirm which businesses are appropriate to hire. A solutions-oriented individual with a passion for spreadsheets and coding, Perton enjoys using his analytical skills to solve difficult problems, which is how SimchaSmart.com was conceived back in 2025 and launched just a few months ago.

SimchaSmart is a free to use, community-powered vendor directory designed to help Jewish families plan their most important life celebrations: weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, brisim, engagements, etc. It works by collecting and bringing together a comprehensive, searchable database of vendors across every category you need: wedding halls, caterers, photographers, videographers, florists, musicians, makeup artists, invitation designers, gemachs, and beyond. There is even an option of seeing which halls offer takanah packages.

“Finding the right vendor for a simcha can be overwhelming. SimchaSmart simplifies the process by giving you access to real reviews from real community members, transparent pricing information, and direct contact details, all in one place,” explains Perton, adding that his site allows “the consumer to find vetted vendors, compare options, read honest reviews, and plan one’s celebration with confidence by making wise investments.”

Perton views SimchaSmart more as a community resource than as a profit-driven business. His hope is that over time, and with the help of AI, the site will allow users to type in their event criteria and SimchaSmart would spit out the ideal vendors for their party. Until then, Yisroel Perton continues tirelessly to improve the site based on feedback from our users, ensuring that the directory is accurate, up-to-date, and seamless to operate. He recently modified the page by allowing it to include Google reviews, with AI filtering the ones that are from those who actually worked with the vendor; Perton then either approves or rejects it.

Perton’s tech background really helps here as he is able to scrape the web using an LLM to find vendors that match a specific profile, and then approves them before they go live. He hopes to continue making upgrades to the site like adding in different languages and having a feature where customers can see which vendors are tied to each other. He is also toying with the concept of including an event plan board where users can make checklists and invite others to view their vendors and add their personal notes and comments.

SimchaSmart is not just helpful for the baal simcha, but it also aids vendors and businesses by giving them a platform to showcase their work and gain exposure with the thousands of families actively planning their simchas.

But how does SimchaSmart weed out disgruntled customers or those seeking to sabotage other people’s businesses by posting fake negative reviews? Although Perton admits that one can never know with absolute certainty if the reviews are authentic, he made sure to consult with rabbinic leaders to ensure that his site follows the halachic frameworks of l'toeles, by refraining from engaging in lashon hara and making sure all feedback is tachlis based. He does this by personally evaluating each response to make sure it adheres to the page’s guidelines of no gossip, slander, personal attacks, exaggerations, or repetitive postings. The site requires users to sign up to post, allowing Perton to filter out anonymous people who just want to post fake and highly negative reviews.

Currently, there are close to 500 vendors featured on the site, over 100 posts, 1,652 page views, and over 30 hits a day – mostly from the tri-state area. But Perton also observed from the analytics that there has been increased usage by users from distant countries and even Israel. Not bad for a site that just launched in May and has virtually no marketing or social media.

“This is not a page designed for bookings, rather it works to be like a White Pages of simchos,” he clarifies. Thanks to SimchaSmart, we are now spared from making poor investment choices and having to listen to endless hours of nonsensical babble, and instead harness our energy into making a beautiful and meaningful simcha.