Yocheved Lerner-Miller is a matchmaker for Orthodox Jews who come from unorthodox backgrounds.

“Look, the perfect boy from the top yeshiva and the perfect girl from the best seminary probably don’t need me,” she said, sitting inside Choco Latte, a kosher coffee shop in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. “I deal with divorced people. I deal with older singles who are already in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond. Sometimes they’re just people who somehow missed the boat, or they’re converts.”

Even though Ms. Lerner-Miller, 55, lives in Kensington, she jokingly referred to the section of Crown Heights south of Eastern Parkway around Kingston Avenue as her shtetl. For Lubavitch Jews, members of the Orthodox movement she belongs to, it’s an area “where everybody somehow ends up at some point.”

Ms. Lerner-Miller has earned a reputation in the community for pairing up oddballs and outliers — words she uses affectionately and with which she identifies.

Born Jill Lerner into a nonpracticing Jewish family in Brooklyn, she was always drawn to religion.

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