A House With the Lights On

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How Yosef and Sarah Shidler turned their Toms River home into the address young people reach for when they have run out of others.

BUNKER OF LIGHT

There is a phone call the Shidlers have learned to recognize. A young person is stranded, or in crisis, or has nowhere to sleep. Sometimes the caller has met them before. Sometimes a friend has passed along their number. The details change; the answer is usually the same.

“Come over.”

There is a street in Toms River where, most Shabbosim, the lights stay on a little later and the table runs a little longer than anyone planned. People come for a meal and remain for hours. Someone claims a corner of the couch. Someone opens a cabinet. A dog settles beside the quietest person in the room. On the ground level are five guest bedrooms with fifteen beds, and on many weekends and Yamim Tovim, nearly every one is taken. When the rooms fill, the couch becomes the overflow.

The place is called Bunker of Light, after Bunker Hill Drive, the street where Yosef and Sarah Shidler bought their home in 2019. But the young people who come do not speak first about a program. They speak about a house.

“It just feels like a home,” one teen says. Another remembers arriving alone and leaving with the feeling that she had found “a new family.” A third calls it an extra place she can go whenever she needs it. Across hours of interviews for an upcoming video, young people keep returning to the same words: home, family, safe, accepted.

That says more than any mission statement could. The first thing Bunker gives them is not an answer. It is an address.

The Moment in the Parking Lot

The idea began, as these things sometimes do, with a man alone in a parked car. It was night, outside the Bun in Lakewood, and Yosef was not looking for a mission. He was a Chabad guy with a wedding-photography business and a houseful of Shabbos guests most weeks. Then he noticed a cluster of teenagers, boys and girls, hanging around outside. They did not look like the Lakewood crowd he knew: the boys were not wearing kippahs; the girls were not dressed the way he expected on that block. For a moment—and he is not proud of the thought—he wondered whether they were even Jewish.

Then it landed on him all at once.

Of course they are. I am sitting in front of a kosher restaurant in Lakewood. These are our own brothers and sisters. They are struggling right in front of me—and I am a Chabad guy. What am I actually doing to help them?

He did not move. He had no program, no connection to that world, and no room; his house was already full every Shabbos. But something had shifted.

“Once you see something like that, you can’t un-see it.”

The hosting had begun long before the name. Ask Yosef and Sarah when it started, and Yosef goes back to the chuppah: even during sheva brachos, if friends needed a place, they were told to stay with them. It was not framed as outreach. It was simply how they lived.

For Sarah, hospitality is less an inheritance than a debt she has spent her life repaying. She did not grow up religious, and she did not grow up in an open home. She grew up, in crucial stretches, in other people’s.

“My mom had a chronic illness and was in the hospital for most of middle school,” she says. “My friends’ families took me in while my dad handled the medical stuff. They took me on vacations. I guess this is my way to pay it forward.”

When her parents divorced, she moved to Israel for high school and was hosted nearly every week for four years by people who owed her nothing.

“I learned firsthand what darkness really looks like—and what it looks like to be taken in by complete strangers. So of course we were going to have an open home. It’s not something I went looking for. It just kept coming to me, and I let it happen.”

Yosef came to it from a different direction. He was raised in Denver, became frum by his bar mitzvah, and was the first in five generations of his family to attend yeshiva. Both he and Sarah had needed to find their own way in. It made sense that their home would never check credentials at the door. They married, moved to the Lakewood area in 2016—not to become anyone’s shluchim, but to build a life outside Brooklyn—and three years later bought the house on Bunker Hill Drive.

“I can’t even remember a time our house didn’t have extra people in it,” Sarah says. Single guys stayed for months; her siblings each took a turn. “We’re just that kind of family.”

Building Room for Whatever Came Next

The vision Yosef carried home from the parking lot needed room the Shidlers did not have. About three summers ago, they took out a loan and began expanding, taking on debt without yet knowing how they would repay it. They built more beds and more space for whatever was coming. Yosef had a working name and a picture he could not yet bring fully into focus: a Shabbos home, a Chabad-style place for teens, a landing spot for people in crisis, and perhaps one day a property with land and animals.

“The mission chose me,” he says. “I didn’t choose the mission.”

Then Yosef became the contractor—a man who says he could not build a sukkah, teaching himself framing and building codes on YouTube while overseeing the crews. Looking back at the permits, timing and resources that came together, he sees yad Hashem and what he calls open miracles. Faith did not spare him the learning curve, but he never felt he was building alone.

Even before the work was formal, he once opened the house to a group of boys and watched the weekend run further off the rails than he had imagined, drugs included. He files it as the year he learned that good intentions without presence and boundaries are not enough. During construction, another group spent Shabbos running on the roof of the half-built house. The crowd has since settled into a somewhat older group—late teens and young adults—but those early weekends taught him an important lesson: warmth still needs rules, attention and a steady hand.

By this past Rosh Hashanah, the house was ready. Yosef posted in Lakewood groups that anyone who needed a place could come. He planned a boys’ program; within days, sixteen to eighteen had asked to join, most between fifteen and twenty-two. A few days before Yom Tov, the scale of it—and the fear—hit him.

“Who said I’m the right person to handle this?”

He had written rules: no smoking, no drugs, no alcohol. The boys arrived with skateboards and a street energy he had not braced for, some barely wearing yarmulkes. As Yom Tov came in, he stood in his kapote with sixteen teenagers downstairs and no script. So he did the most Chabad thing available: he walked down and said, “Guys, let’s go outside and make Maariv.” They built a small minyan in the backyard.

The seudah that followed was holy and chaotic at the same time. There were boys at a Yom Tov table who had nowhere else they felt comfortable. There was also the unmistakable smell of weed drifting in from the backyard, where they had gone to half-hide it. Yosef was caught between enforcing a boundary and humiliating young people who might simply leave. A girl arrived unannounced; a few more people appeared at four in the morning, and he sent them elsewhere when the night began tipping toward a party in the middle of Rosh Hashanah.

Still, the scene told him something more important than any rule: how badly these young people wanted somewhere they could feel at ease.

“The room smelled like weed, and at the same time we had just blown shofar for these kids,” he says. “And I kept thinking—if they weren’t here, where would they be?”

After that first Rosh Hashanah, Yosef and Sarah asked each other whether to continue. Then, on the first Shabbos of the year, a boy sat down with Yosef on Friday night and did not get up until four in the morning. They walked the neighborhood for hours. The boy spoke about a family that had come apart, about being handed between parents who could not hold him, about the pull of the street and the substance use that came with it.

“He was crying in front of me,” Yosef says, “and I was crying with him.”

What Yosef had first seen as rebellion began to look more like pain. Sometimes a young person came from a broken home. Sometimes the family was loving, but the child simply did not fit the school or system around them. Some were carrying deep abuse and trauma that had never been treated. Others were saying something simpler: I do not fit Lakewood’s cookie-cutter mold, but I still want to be Jewish. I am just lost and confused about what that means. Whatever the story, a lecture was not what they needed first. They needed a relationship.

Human First

Sarah can explain the whole approach while standing in front of an open cabinet. In her home, the order is simple: before a word of Torah, before a conversation about God, a person needs to feel physically safe.

“Physical safety and security come before anything,” she says. “If they want to talk Torah, talk God, we’re here. But first they need to feel secure and connected as people.”

In daily life, that looks surprisingly simple: cabinets overflowing with snacks, a refrigerator stocked with drinks the family cannot really afford, a candy jar, blankets and pillows. Sarah’s grandmother was a Holocaust survivor; her father grew up with the penny-pinching and watchfulness that can gather around a single slice of bread. Sarah has built the opposite on purpose. Cookie Corner, Yishtabach, Beru, Lechem and Epstein’s are among the local businesses that regularly send leftovers to help keep the house stocked for Shabbos guests.

None of it is an extra. It is what the house believes, expressed in seltzer and cookies: You are worth feeding before you are asked for anything at all.

A therapist interviewed for the Bunker film explains why that matters. Even when a boy or girl is doing serious personal work, there are times when treatment alone is not enough. A young person may also need a safe place to spend an afternoon or a Shabbos—a home where they can breathe and feel what the therapist calls “the warmth of being accepted.”

That warmth is what the teens notice.

One girl puts the difference simply: “You feel safe there. You feel comfortable. Like, it’s a home. You can share whatever is on your mind.” Then she adds, “It feels way homier than going to a regular Shabbaton. It’s like a family.”

For another teen, the relief comes from not having to put on an act. “I feel like I could be myself,” she says, “and just relax and just chill.”

One young woman came in after experiencing homelessness. Her belongings and documents had been stolen; she lacked even the basic identification needed to move through ordinary life. A friend gave her the Shidlers’ number.

“They picked me up right away,” she says. “No questions asked.”

The invitation was not forever. Yosef set a time frame and a goal: get steady, put the pieces back together and begin living independently. During those months, the Shidlers helped her get a birth certificate and other documents, connect with mental-health care, and find work. At first, she says, all she could think about was surviving. Knowing she had food and a bed gave her enough room to start moving forward.

She says the Shidlers gave her the space and support she needed at that moment. Now, when she needs help at a doctor’s appointment, she can call a mentor or the Shidlers. She has even listed them as an emergency contact.

That last detail is not unusual. Young people the Shidlers first met over Shabbos have put their names on hospital forms. Sarah finds it moving and heartbreaking at the same time: a “random family,” as she puts it, becoming the people a young person wants called in an emergency. Those calls are not rare. Many of the young people are still trying to find their place in life after a world that has not always been kind about how they dress, look or think. But, Sarah says, before any of those differences, they are our brothers and sisters.

The line their rabbanim gave the Shidlers, and the one Sarah returns to, is simple: “First make a human being. Then you can make a Jew.” Tend to the human first—fed, safe, steady, seen—and trust that the rest will have room to grow.

The Shidlers are careful about what that does and does not mean. “We’re not going against the grain or against authority,” Sarah says. “We work with our rabbanim on all of it. That matters to us.” Separate boys’ and girls’ Shabbosos are run with rabbinic guidance. The girls’ weekends began with two or three guests and grew to seven or eight, sometimes fifteen. Capacity is fifteen beds, and word of mouth fills them most weeks.

Seven Dogs and a Place to Exhale

The family dogs can sound like a funny side note until the teens describe them. Then it becomes clear that the dogs are part of what makes the house feel safe.

One young woman remembers walking in from the snow and being met by seven dogs barking and licking her. During the four months she lived there, rough nights and difficult calls often ended on the couch with the dogs pressed around her—one on a shoulder, another across her legs, others at her feet.

“I was getting this for free from seven dogs,” she says with a laugh. Then she turns serious: “It helped me with my anxiety when I was stressed. It just calmed me.” The Shidlers call it free doodle therapy.

Another teen had just finished a painful phone conversation when Dunkin, a golden doodle, came over and settled into her lap. “It was really comforting,” she says. Other teens say the same thing: the dogs seem to know who needs them. They ask no questions. They simply come close.

That is the feeling the house tries to offer. There are rules, and no one promises that life will suddenly become easy. But for a while, a young person can stop expecting rejection and begin thinking about what comes next.

Their Own Family Comes First

The calls that reach Sarah are rarely as simple as a bed. A young person says he was kicked out; she pulls the thread and learns the offense was staying out late or smoking weed—a teenager still in yeshiva made homeless over behavior that, however serious, should not cost a child a roof. The Shidlers help find jobs, line up care and sit beside young people at medical appointments because many have never had an adult advocate they truly felt comfortable with.

The need becomes especially clear around the Yamim Tovim. This past Pesach, when families travel and those with nowhere to belong feel it most, the calls came in waves. The Seder grew to more than twenty people, many of them young and with nowhere else to be that night. Some families called the Shidlers directly, asking whether they could send a struggling teen because Bunker was the one place that seemed to make sense.

None of this is free of cost, and the Shidlers do not pretend otherwise. Their children come first.

“People worried our own kids would get sidelined,” Sarah says. “No—that’s exactly why we built bigger, so they’d still have their own rooms. We take each of our kids on a date every week. They’re our number-one priority, and they feel it’s part of their mission to make the guests welcome.”

The couple sits in therapy, keeps coaches and rabbanim close, and returns to the same question: How do we make this work for our own children, too?

“Sometimes they complain,” Sarah says. “I’m not going to lie.” This is not a picture-perfect family. It is a real one weighing the needs of its children and guests every week.

They have also learned that live-in help works best when it is not forever. During construction, they took in a fifteen-year-old girl from a fractured home who was struggling with an eating disorder. She flourished for months with support the Shidlers funded themselves, until a trigger led to a suicide attempt. The crisis threw the family into emergency rooms and advocacy systems they did not know. One month later, their own daughter experienced a medication crisis; this time Sarah knew whom to call.

The lesson was not to close the door. It was to be clear about why it was open: to give someone a place to get steady, and then help them take the next step. Not a permanent solution. A floor to stand on.

Meeting Fear With a Wider Door

No honest account skips the pushback. The Shidlers live on a mostly Jewish block, and they understand why a house full of arrivals and departures can make anyone uneasy. They work to protect the peace of the street. The most common complaint is cars on Shabbos. It is not constant, but it happens: now and then someone chooses to drive to a Friday-night meal rather than to a bar.

Yosef compares the situation to a Hatzalah vehicle moving through a neighborhood on Shabbos. No one flinches, because someone may be having a heart attack. “Maybe we’re not dealing with a physical heart attack,” he says. “But we are dealing with spiritual heart attacks.” He is also quick to say that not every crisis is spiritual. Some are emotional or mental. Others are painfully practical. A warm bowl of soup and a listening ear may be what keeps a bad night from becoming worse.

Community concern is not always unkind. It can come from fear for one’s own children, questions about boundaries, or discomfort with struggles people do not know how to handle. The teens sense that discomfort instantly. As the therapist puts it, their radars are finely tuned to whether they are truly wanted. Young people can tell when someone is only going through the motions. The welcome has to be real.

Sarah has also watched the influence go both ways. Some of the older girls whom others feared might be a bad influence have become trusted mentors to her own children, taking a daughter or son for ice cream and offering attention. In her home, the young people others were wary of are sometimes the babysitters.

The questions are real, but so is the person standing at the door. A hoodie does not tell you someone’s whole story. Neither do a young person’s doubts, clothing or past. The Shidlers do not answer every concern with an argument. They answer by meeting the person, setting clear limits and keeping the relationship.

Yosef found perspective at the shloshim of Rabbi Chaim Abadi, who led a parallel effort whose boys often reach Bunker as well. Rav Aharon Kotler Jr. recalled how much opposition that work drew before people understood it. Yosef heard something familiar in the story. New work is rarely trusted—or fully formed—at the beginning.

Yosef does not see similar organizations as competition. “You could have twenty more places like this in town before we’d start seeing real change.”

A Floor to Push Up From

The story Yosef returns to began with a phone call a few days before the High Holidays, before Bunker had officially opened. A twenty-three-year-old said he had nowhere to sleep and asked whether he could come.

“I asked him, ‘Where have you been sleeping the last few nights?’ He said, ‘In the forest.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, the forest?’ And he said, ‘Yeah. The forest.’”

The history was long and complicated, as these stories usually are. He was originally from Lakewood and had moved around, living without one steady address. In the place where he had most recently stayed, his appearance made people uneasy. A young man from the community ended up sleeping in the woods—not in a tent—because no one would let him land long enough to get back on his feet.

He came to the Shidlers and stayed for the month of Tishrei. In those thirty days, with the holidays giving the time its shape, he found a job, found a place to live and moved out on his own feet. He had not needed to be saved so much as he needed a floor to push up from.

Yosef does not turn the story into a neat tale of religious return. Most of their conversations were about the young man’s doubts about God and his place in the world. But on the first morning, Yosef walked downstairs and saw him putting on tefillin.

“I never asked him to,” he says, “and I never saw it again after that morning.”

Yosef has thought about that moment many times. Perhaps the young man was nervous, unsure whether he would have a bed the next night, trying to make a good impression on the family that had taken him in. Yosef does not read that as failure. Many guests come through the door expecting to be rejected again. The house is where they get to put that fear down.

The Future

For all the ambition around Bunker—a larger property, more beds, land and animals—Sarah’s real vision is not mainly a building. It is that more people will open their homes and that fewer young people will need an emergency address at all. “These are your brothers and sisters,” she says. “The ones who need extra love, not to be dismissed from the public eye.”

Yosef expresses the same idea in the language of his Chabad upbringing: “We seek out Jews with love.” Not to force an outcome. Not to win someone back. To make clear that a place remains for them.

One line from the interviews holds the whole story: “Sometimes the journey back home begins with finding a home away from home.”

Ask Yosef why a month of his home and money for a stranger from the forest was worth it, and he reaches for the Hayom Yom, the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s book of a thought for each day. The entry for Hey Iyar—Yosef’s birthday—teaches in the name of the Baal Shem Tov that a soul can descend into this world and live seventy or eighty years in order to do another Jew a single favor in material matters, and how much more so in spiritual ones.

A whole soul, a whole lifetime, for one material favor for one other person. That, Yosef says, is the job. Not to fix everyone. Not to win anyone back. To give a person a floor—a plate, a bed, a stocked cabinet, a month—and trust that the favor itself is reason enough for a soul to have come all this way.

Back on that street in Toms River, the lights are still on. The table is still longer than anyone planned. And somewhere is the next phone call, from the next person with nowhere to go, who is about to hear the same answer.

Come over. There is an address after all.

More information @ BunkerOfLight.org