Ninety-thousand Jews will gather in Metlife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., to celebrate Siyum HaShas, the completion of a Talmud study program that occurs once every seven-and-a-half years.
The attendants will be finishing a study program called Daf Yomi, “page of the day,” a daily regimen of learning the 2,711 pages of the Babylonian Talmud in sequence. Under this regimen, the entire Talmud is completed, one day at a time, in a cycle of seven and a half years.
Tens of thousands of Jews worldwide study in the Daf Yomi program, and more than 300,000 participate in the Siyum HaShas. The Daf Yomi program has been credited with making Talmud study accessible to Jews who are not Torah scholars, contributing to Jewish continuity after the Holocaust, and turning Talmud study into a unifying force among Jews, as everyone participating learns the same page on the same day.
According to Business Wire, attendees at the stadium will have come from as far away as Australia. The ceremony will be simulcast to 80 other cities, spanning 15 countries.
JTA contributed to this report.