From a Shabbat table in Santa Barbra to a global movement

It started, as so many good Jewish stories do, with a Shabbat dinner.

In the early 2000s, David Cygielman was a university student at UC Santa Barbara, teaching Sunday school at the local synagogue and trying to figure out what Jewish life could look like for young people without a built-in community. He didn’t grow up doing Shabbat. He went to Catholic high school. He’d never been to Jewish summer camp. It was a trip to Israel during high school that gave him his first real taste of Jewish community, and he wanted more of it. But he didn’t know how to build it.

Then he met Lorna Berger.

Berger, who was living in Santa Barbara at the time with her husband David and children, ran what became known in the community as the “Shabbos House”. Every Friday night, up to 30 people squeezed around the family’s table for homemade chopped liver, chicken soup, and the kind of warmth that made everyone feel they belonged. Shopping happened on Wednesdays. Cooking took over Thursdays and Fridays. Their daughters, Candy and Sasha, grew up as part of the production line. Candy would make the chopped liver and chicken soup alongside her father, Sasha took charge of desserts.

“My late husband Dave and I cooked proper Shabbos every single week,” Berger recalled. “We invited everyone: the Hillel students who taught our children, university students far from home, friends with children the same age as ours, and anyone who didn’t have somewhere to go, or even those who did.”