Swipe right and a Star of David with a happy face appears; swipe left and it wears a frown. When a couple match, animated figures appear doing the hora.

The similarities to Tinder are not by coincidence.

“As soon as I touched Tinder, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is the next step that needs to exist in the Jewish community,’ ” said David Yarus, a 28-year-old entrepreneur who said he made the app “kind of as a joke.”

But he is taking it seriously now.

“I’ve unlocked this alignment of truth in my life where my passion and my profession and my expertise is all the same thing right now,” he said.

Mr. Yarus describes typical JSwipe users as “millennial Jews around the world whose grandparents and mothers are saying, ‘When are you going to marry someone Jewish?’ ”

He counts himself among the target audience. Though Mr. Yarus grew up in an observant Jewish household in Miami Beach and attends a synagogue in the tradition of the Carlebach spiritual movement in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, he calls himself “post-affiliation.” (“I don’t do labels,” he said.)