Community Magazine April 2012

of each seven-and-a-half-year journey through the Talmud, hundreds of thousands of Daf Yomi students from around the world would join in a glorious simhat haTorah – a Siyum HaShas, celebrating the completion of the Talmud. Attendance at the very first SiyumHaShas, which was arranged and presided over by Rabbi Shapiro himself, fell short of the large numbers that he dared to imagine, but the event did succeed in drawing participants from throughout Poland and beyond. A Siyum was also held at Yeshiva of Meah Shearim in Jerusalem. The European gathering, held at Rabbi Shapiro’s then relatively new Yeshivat Hachmei Lublin, would be the only Siyum HaShas that the “father of Daf Yomi,” who died at the young age of 46, would ever attend. His revolutionary study program, though, would flourish over the next few decades, as Torah Jews of every background – from Lithuanian to Hassidic to Sephardic, from “black hatters” to “colored kippot ,” from fulltime kollel students to physicians to lawyers to businessmen – pulled up seats in the international “yeshiva without walls.” The Daf Yomi explosion would be reflected in the steady increase in attendance at the Siyum celebrations. In North America, the primary events, organized by Agudath Israel of America, grew from a gathering of several hundred in 1960 to a mammoth 2005 celebration that drew tens of thousands of Jews from around the world and necessitated the booking of three separate venues – the main arena at Madison Square Garden, New York’s Jacob Javits Center, and the Continental Airlines Arena in New Jersey. 38 COMMUNITY MAGAZINE