Summary. Perform a Google search on the word phone and the Hebrew word olam and the top result will be the login page for the AT&T website.
A few years ago I’d noticed the word olam showing up in the web address for the AT&T login page and thought it was interesting that they would have a Hebrew word in their address. The word olam means world as in Tikkun Olam.
I wasn’t sure what the Hebrew or Jewish connection might be. I subsequently learned that olam is claimed to be an acronym for OnLine Account Management.
Yesterday, when I received an email from AT&T with Hebrew letters in it, I felt compelled to investigate this a little further. Below is a clipping of the email I received yesterday. You’ll notice the Hebrew letters (which are also used in numbering) being used in a list of items. The only other reference I found to another occurrence of this anomaly was a single blog entry from 17 January 2010.
Like most of life’s great mysteries, this one remains unsolved.
However, one possibility is that AT&T uses an office in Israel to manage much of their business operations. If the program used to create the email was set to default in Hebrew, yet the person was writing it in English, the software may still default to the Hebrew numbers in the list.
In October 2010, it was announced that AT&T would be expanding their presence at innovation centers in Palo Alto, CA, Plano, TX, and Ra’anana, near Tel Aviv, Israel.
So, it’s a likely possibility that someone familiar with Hebrew was behind the Olam name of dual meaning as well as well as the occasional emails sent out with Hebrew letters.
As for the AT&T connection to Talmud and Torah mysteries, there doesn’t seem to be one.