When the sun began its descent over the nation’s capital last Friday afternoon, something unprecedented was unfolding inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Roughly 120 Jewish guests gathered in the ornate Indian Treaty Room for a pre-Shabbos reception hosted by the White House — a direct expression of President Donald Trump’s historic proclamation calling on the country to observe what has become widely known as Shabbat 250.

As part of the White House’s Jewish American Heritage Month proclamation, President Trump designated the period from sundown Friday, May 15, through nightfall Saturday, May 16, as a national Shabbos, in honor of the 250th anniversary of American independence.
The call marked the first time an American president had formally urged the celebration of Shabbos.

Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch-Chabad and one of the most recognizable Jewish faces on the Washington political scene, was among those who spoke at the event. Rabbi Shemtov, in a Sunday interview with Belaaz, described the atmosphere inside the Indian Treaty Room as lively and warm. Guests enjoyed tapas-style hors d’oeuvres and refreshments, and the gathering wrapped up with enough time for everyone to make their way home before the z’man.

From there, the evening only deepened. A group made their way on foot to the Decatur House, adjacent to the White House, where davening was followed by a full Shabbos seudah — with Rabbi Shemtov making Kiddush for the roughly 100 guests in attendance.

Martin Marks, Special Assistant to the President and White House Liaison to the Jewish Community, also addressed the crowd. “The room broke out into singing and dancing,” Rabbi Shemtov said. “It was lebedik — very lebedik.”

A separate Shabbos dinner, organized by Arie Lipnick of the Combat Antisemitism Movement, drew a parallel gathering of Jewish administration members, Capitol Hill staff, media figures, and policy professionals in celebration of the president’s national Shabbos.
President Trump, who had been returning from a lengthy trip to China, touched down as the White House event was winding down and was not present at the seudos.

Rabbi Shemtov said he also witnessed a beautiful Kabbalas Shabbos in the courtyard of the complex.

Asked whether he had seen anything quite like it before, he reached back to a different memory — a massive musical davening led by Beri Weber outside the White House on the day of a major Washington rally, with what he estimated was close to a thousand people and a massive Kiddush Hashem. “But that,” he noted, “was not inside the White House. This was actually at the White House.”

For Rabbi Shemtov, the significance of the moment ran far deeper than the festivities themselves. He drew a pointed historical parallel. “Compare it to Antiochus,” he said. “Antiochus forbade the Jewish people from keeping Shabbos, from performing bris milah, from sanctifying Rosh Chodesh — because he wanted Jewish observance stripped of its quality of kabbolas ohl, of submission to the ratzon of the Ribono Shel Olam. Here comes the President of the United States, leader of the free world, and decides that he’s going to call on Jewish people to keep Shabbos.”

The proclamation itself came as part of a weekend in which the administration had organized a large prayer event on the National Mall — a multi-faith gathering that, as Rabbi Shemtov noted, was not something many Jewish people could comfortably or appropriately participate in.

The President’s singling out of Shabbos for the Jewish community, rather than folding them into the broader program, carried its own message. “He wants to make sure that when they say they’re celebrating their Judeo-Christian values or the foundations of the founding of America, that includes people who are of the Jewish faith,” Rabbi Shemtov said. “I think that’s very interesting and unprecedented. It means Jews are being told that they can observe their religion without compromise.”

What made this gesture stand apart from prior presidential outreach, he explained, was its reach. Making the White House kosher for a party — as George W. Bush did during his administration — was one thing. “Here he’s asking people to do something outside the White House, across the country,” Rabbi Shemtov said.

The proclamation invoked President George Washington’s seminal 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, and paid tribute to Revolutionary War-era financier Haym Salomon, highlighting the role Jewish Americans have played in the life of the nation since its founding.

While the website Shabbat250.org logged over 7,500 pledges to observe Shabbos, Rabbi Shemtov said the true scope of the response was almost certainly far greater. “I don’t think you have to think wildly to say that hundreds of thousands of people across the country responded to this call,” he said, pointing to the wave of Chabad House programs organized specially for the occasion, shuls that marked the Shabbos in unique ways, Chabad on Campus initiatives, and alerts and calls to action issued by the OU, Agudath Israel and affiliated organizations.

For Rabbi Shemtov, the cumulative effect of that response captured something essential about what the proclamation was meant to accomplish. The Shabbat 250 call, he said, reached Jews across the spectrum — those keeping Shabbos for the first time, those being brought to the table by a friend or family member who keeps Shabbks, and even those who are fully shomer Shabbos but were given pause to reflect on just how fortunate they are.
“The Ribono Shel Olam has allowed us a unique freedom within the larger society for us to do what we need to do in terms of Yiddishkeit without any interference into our practices,” he said. “That is something very, very important.”

“When the president asked people across the country, everywhere, who are of the Jewish faith, to do something about Shabbos — that wasn’t only that he took it personally,” Rabbi Shemtov said. “He wanted them — meaning us — to take it personally.”