A Timeless Shabbat with Holocaust Survivors

Six Stories from my Sabbath Table 

Shared by Rabbi Dov Gartenberg 

2025 End of Year Campaign in Support of Shabbat with Friends NM 

A Third Story from my Sabbath Table.  

Motzei Shabbat-After Shabbat, Saturday Night, December 27, 2025 

In the summer of 1977, after working as a camp counselor at Camp Ramah in Ojai, California, my friend and co-counselor, Jonathan Jacoby, invited me to his parents’ home for Shabbat lunch. I knew his parents were Holocaust survivors from Hungary. His father, Emil, had fought in the Resistance against the Nazis. His mother, Erica, had endured the last year of the war in Auschwitz. 

The moment I stepped into their home, I felt embraced by warmth. Emil and Erica greeted me with smiles that carried both strength and tenderness. Their Shabbat table was a vision of beauty—candles glowing, challah glistening, a quiet holiness filling the room. After the blessings, we began to talk. They spoke of childhoods in Hungary, of the terror of 1944 when Hungarian Jews were rounded up, and of the unimaginable suffering that followed. They told me how, against all odds, they survived, met, and built a new life in America. 

Then something extraordinary happened. One of the Jacoby children began singing from the bencher. Slowly, voices joined in until the room pulsed with song—joyful, boisterous, unstoppable. For an hour, we sang as if the walls themselves were dancing. I sat in awe. How could people who had endured Auschwitz and Nazi brutality sing with such unrestrained joy? How could they transform pain into holiness and celebration? 

That Shabbat changed me forever. In Emil and Erica’s laughter and melodies, I saw the deepest truth of Judaism: the affirmation of life even in the shadow of death. Their courage and joy inspired me to become a rabbi. It also planted in me a lifelong mission—to recreate that Shabbat table wherever I lived, to share it with my family, friends, and the hundreds of guests who have graced my home. Their hospitality and authentic embodiment of Oneg Shabbat—the joy of the Sabbath—became the heartbeat of my rabbinate and ultimately led to the founding of Shabbat with Friends.