c. 1997 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ At the rate of one double-sided page per day, it takes 2,711 consecutive days _ nearly seven and a half years _ to complete a study of the Talmud, the authoritative body of traditional Jewish law and other rabbinic writings.

To complete the task once is considered a formidable accomplishment by Orthodox Jews. Yitzchok Roth, a 49-year-old nursing home administrator from Monsey, N.Y., has done it twice.

Every morning for the past 15 years, Roth has risen before dawn to join a group of Orthodox Jews at his local synagogue in pouring over the words, some of which are as much as 2,500 years old, searching for bits of wisdom on everything from marriage to monetary disputes covered by the Talmud.

Sunday (Sept. 28), just three days before the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, Roth joined an estimated 70,000 other Orthodox Jews across the United States in celebrating the end of another cycle of Talmud study.”There are always new insights, new understandings,”Roth said during a lull in the nearly five-hour celebration at Madison Square Garden.”Once you get into the pattern of study, it’s the most natural thing to try and figure out the will of God at 5:15 in the morning.” The Garden was ground zero of the Talmud study celebration, known as the”Siyum HaShas of Daf Yomi.”Security was tight, with some streets around the Garden closed to traffic and uniformed police seemingly everywhere, mindful that New York’s large Jewish population has in the past been the target of terrorists harboring Middle East grudges. There were no reported incidents.

Some 26,000 Orthodox Jews packed the Garden, and another 18,000 filled the Nassau Coliseum on nearby Long Island. An additional 26,000 Orthodox Jews gathered at 30 other sites around the nation, hooked up to the two New York locations by satellite broadcast. Organizers called the event the largest ever staged by Orthodox Jews.

From Australia to Brazil to Israel, other groups of Orthodox Jews also celebrated the”siyum”_ the completion _ of the Talmud study cycle, which begins and ends on the same day everywhere in the world.

Sunday marked the 10th completion of the”daf yomi”_ Hebrew for page a day _ which was started in 1923 by Agudath Israel, a worldwide, ultra-Orthodox group. In 1990, about 20,000 attended the ninth-cycle siyum held for the first time in the Garden’s main arena, with no broadcast hookups.

Daf yomi participants generally gather in groups of from a half-dozen to 60 or more in local synagogues or homes to spend an hour each day in Talmud study. Others study on their own, hooked into the daf yomi program via the Internet, audio tapes or recorded lessons by phone.

Jerusalem Rabbi Mechel Silber, who provides the voice for the telephone lessons and many of the audio tapes, was at the Garden to lead the siyum in the study of the last few lines of the Talmud’s last page _ a review of ancient Jewish”purity”laws concerning female menstruation.

About 90 minutes later, the reciting of some lines broadcast from the Nassau Coliseum kicked off the 11th cycle, which began with a passage concerning the Jewish biblical obligation to twice daily recite the”Shema,”Judaism’s central statement on God’s monotheistic nature.

In between, there were silent and communal prayers, singing and _ at the Garden at least _ traditional dancing among the men, nearly all wearing black coats and hats, the traditional garb for ultra-Orthodox men. Linking arms, they pushed their way through the densely packed arena in joyous abandon.

A parade of esteemed rabbinic Talmud scholars _ many of them speaking in Yiddish, the one-time lingua franca of European Jews _ exhorted participants to continue studying the Talmud and to spread its teachings among other Jews to hasten the coming of the Messiah.”This is an event not to miss,”said Shaya Tesser, a commercial real estate salesman from Lakewood, N.J., who came to the Garden with his two young sons, his father-in-law, his two brothers-in-law and their sons.”It’s a celebration of Jewish learning and I want my sons to know this, to feel this in their souls,”said Tesser, who like many at the Garden had not actually completed the full daf yomi study program.”I study a little every single day, but it’s not daf yomi. Just a little study in a busy life,”he said.

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Male-dominated Orthodox Judaism restricts Talmud study to men, although women are allowed to study the Bible. That didn’t stop several thousand women from joining their men at the Garden _ even if they had to sit separately in the arena’s upper-most seats. During some periods of prayer, curtains were drawn to hide the women, a customary practice in Orthodox synagogues.

At a time when some more liberal Orthodox women are resisting these traditional restrictions, Rivkie Lachman _ her hair covered by a wig in conformity with Orthodox rules relating to female modesty _ has no such problem.”The basis of a Jewish home is the study of Talmud …”said Lachman, who is from Brooklyn, N.Y.”Of course we encourage our men and sons in this regard. That is our role and it’s beautiful.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Just 8 percent of the nation’s 5.9 million Jews identify themselves as Orthodox and many of those count themselves among the so-called”modern,”or centrist, Orthodox community.

Modern Orthodox mix willingly in secular society, while ultra-Orthodox Jews seek to limit such associations and are more aggressively critical of liberal conservative and reform Jews, who rarely engage in such intense religious study as the daf yomi program but who comprise the majority of American Jews. The ultra-Orthodox see liberal Jews as having compromised the faith.

Many European ultra-Orthodox communities were decimated during the Holocaust, and Sunday’s event was presented as much as a triumph of Orthodoxy’s survival as it was just another completion of the daf yomi cycle.

Special prayers were recited in honor of Holocaust victims and”Ani Ma’amin,”the song about everlasting faith that many ultra-Orthodox victims of the Nazis sang softly as they entered the gas chambers, was sung at the Garden by a lone, powerful male voice in one of the event’s most moving moments.”The Nazis wanted to destroy Talmud … study because they knew this was the key to Jewish continuity,”said Rabbi Moshe Sherer, president of the New York-based Agudath Israel of America.

The siyum, he said, was”a powerful demonstration, a powerful demonstration that the Nazis had failed and that Orthodox Judaism had prevailed.”

MJP END RIFKIN