When proposing the concept of daf yomi at the First World Congress of Agudath Israel in Vienna, Rabbi Shapiro said, “What a great thing! A Jew travels by boat and takes Gemara Berachot under his arm. He travels for 15 days from Eretz Yisrael to America, and each day he learns the daf. When he arrives in America, he enters a beis midrash in New York and finds Jews learning the very same daf that he studied on that day, and he gladly joins them. Another Jew leaves the States and travels to Brazil or Japan, and he first goes to the beis midrash, where he finds everyone learning the same daf that he himself learned that day. Could there be greater unity of hearts than this?”
Almost 90 years later, people are still studying daf yomi in Poland, Israel, America, Brazil, and Japan. In a digital world, Jews can perpetuate and augment that unity using the new application from ArtScroll and continue Rabbi Shapiro’s dream.