‘Shabbos for Soldiers’

When Sasha Liknaitzky-Drutz and David Drutz of Toronto held their first soup-to-nuts Shabbat on Dec. 22, the guest of honor was 6,000 miles away.

Now in their second year of marriage, the couple had been to many a Shabbat meal, but as for keeping the entire thing, “we’d just never done it,” said Sasha.

Nor did they have any immediate plans to do so until they heard that by simply observing the day fully, they could step in for a soldier on active duty in the Israel Defense Forces who normally keeps it but currently cannot.

And that’s exactly what Shabbat 4 Soldiers is designed to do. The program’s seeds were planted last November, a month after Hamas’s Simchat Torah massacre on Oct. 7 and the beginning of the war. That’s when Rabbis Tzvi Sytner and Simcha Tolwin, on a support mission to Israel, began asking the soldiers they met, “What can we outside of Israel do for you?”

“We kept hearing the same answers,” said Sytner: “Pray for us, do a mitzvah for us.”

“So we thought, wait, what if we pair up a soldier who normally keeps Shabbat but can’t with someone who doesn’t normally keep Shabbat but can?” he said. “What if they keep it for him?”

Within days of the two Aish HaTorah rabbis returning home to their respective communities — Sytner to Toronto and Tolwin to Detroit — the seeds of Shabbat 4 Soldiers were already germinating.

Within its first month, 85 households have kept Shabbat for the first time, and more Shabbat first-timers are being matched with more soldiers each week.

When the couple visited the website to select the soldier for whom to observe Shabbat, “we both felt so drawn to Baruch,” said David. “We liked that he has a wife and little kids at home, and we felt a connection to him.” (Turns out both he and Sasha have families from South Africa).

The guests — family, friends and one man they’d just met at a Chanukah party — invited, the chicken cacciatore and carrot kugel done, the timers set and the dishes arranged on a white tablecloth, they were ready. And from the moment they lit the Shabbat candles to the time they extinguished the Havdalah candle, they stayed true to the day.