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.”

“A place where Jewish young people could gather, feel safe, celebrate their identity proudly, laugh loudly, make lifelong friendships, and simply belong.”

Her husband came from a German Jewish family, Berger from an English one, and together their table reflected both traditions. It was not easy being a practising Jew in Santa Barbara. The Orthodox community was tiny, and for many, Judaism centred around Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Friends would laugh and ask, “You’re doing Shabbat again?”

They were.

But the Berger home wasn’t just about the food. Cygielman and the other Hillel students who gathered there became mentors and role models for an entire generation of Jewish children in the small coastal community. “Many of the families came from mixed backgrounds, and while that was part of our community, we all knew our children needed something more,” Berger said. “They needed young Jewish role models. People who lived Judaism proudly and joyfully. Dave and his cohort did exactly that. They spent time with our motley crew because they wanted to, not because they had to.”

For Cygielman, walking into that home was transformative. “Lorna was the first one who really showed us what it was to open up your home for the Jewish community and for the holidays,” he said. “She really showed us what that can look like, because I’d never seen it before.”

Around the same time, Cygielman met Morris Squire, an 80-year-old philanthropist at the local Hillel. Squire wanted to fund ideas but didn’t want to do the work directly. So the two struck an unusual arrangement.

“My job became going over to his house once a week and just sharing up to five ideas with him,” Cygielman explained. “If he liked the ideas, he would fund them, and if not, he would tell me why he’s not going to.”

From that partnership, and with the blueprint of Berger’s Friday night table in mind, Cygielman launched the first Moishe House in Oakland, California, in 2006. He expected a small Shabbat gathering. Seventy-three people showed up.

Two decades later, that single house has grown into MEM Global, the umbrella organisation Cygielman leads as founder and CEO. Its flagship Moishe House program now operates more than 100 houses and pods across 25-plus countries, all built on the same idea: give Jewish young adults a home where they can gather, celebrate and lead.

In Australia, the model has been running since 2013, with houses in Melbourne and Sydney, and Moishe House Without Walls hosts creating programming beyond the physical spaces. The Australian operation is supported by JCA and Shalom Collective, the Education Heritage Foundation, the Erdi Foundation, anonymous family foundations, and Australian Jewish Funders (AJF). MEM Global also directs US-raised general operating funds into Australia. It’s a sign, Cygielman said, of the organisation’s commitment to the local community.

Cygielman, who visited Australia recently for the AJF Launchpad Leadership program, said the country’s strong intergenerational family culture gives Moishe House a distinctive flavour here. “Shabbat’s the biggest program pretty much everywhere else in the world,” he said, explaining the Shabbat culture here is more family-based, so Moishe House Shabbats become more intimate affairs.

Australian houses tend to serve those who do not have the built-in family infrastructure: young people who have moved between cities, international expats, and those who grew up outside the day school system. But the impact is very real. Cygielman described visiting Melbourne before the Launchpad program and getting dinner with alumni and current residents. One of the first-ever Melbourne residents showed him photos of his wife, now pregnant with their third child. The couple had met at a Moishe House event. “They’re figuring out now how to keep building Jewish community,” Cygielman said. “The centre of Jewish life has gotten expensive. The housing. So they live now 45 minutes outside of where the centre of Jewish life is, and they’re creating their Jewish experiences in a different way.”

The network also reaches across borders. One Melbourne couple met through the global Moishe House community. He was an alumnus from the Sydney house, she had been a participant at Moishe House Shanghai. When she moved to Australia, she looked up the local house, started going to events, and the rest followed.

Since October 7, there has been a marked uptick in Israeli engagement, particularly in Sydney. Globally, MEM Global has opened nine all-Israeli Moishe Houses in North America in the past 18 months. “We didn’t have Israeli applicants in these kinds of numbers before October 7,” Cygielman explained.

For Berger, who is executive director of WIZO NSW, community is the heart of everything.

“I have always loved working in our community – love connecting people, passions, and in the case of Santa Barbara, I loved watching the young Jewish community connect and grow. It’s always been something that I have wanted to do.

She said watching what Cygielman built feels like a natural extension of those Friday nights in Santa Barbara.

“He was building exactly what we had tried to build around our own dining table,” she said. “A place where Jewish young people could gather, feel safe, celebrate their identity proudly, laugh loudly, make lifelong friendships, and simply belong.”

Cygielman, for his part, traces it back to her. “I didn’t know how to do it until I got to experience it,” he said, “and Lorna was the best of the best at it.”