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March 4, 2005/Adar I 23 5765, Volume 57, No. 27
Jewish Unity 2005
Jews gather around the globe to celebrate
CHANAN TIGAY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
LEISAH NAMM
Managing Editor
An event celebrating Jewish unity attracted nearly 500 people to the Scottsdale Center for the Arts on March 1.
"It's a new movement in Jewish unity," said Rabbi Zvi Holland, director of the Phoenix Community Kollel, which hosted Jewish Unity Live 2005.
Upon arrival, participants received bags filled with fliers for upcoming community events and silver flashlights with the text "Jewish Unity Live, 'Torah is Light' Megila 16b." During the program, attendees were asked to shine their lights on the ceiling.
Light represents Torah and light represents the soul, explained Holland. "We used the light in order to share the experience with those who were not there."
Bill Straus, regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, emceed the event. Hadassah Lieberman shared stories of life on the campaign trail with husband Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and local community leaders received awards. Vocal ensemble Kol Zimra entertained the audience with a cappella harmonies.
The evening ended with a rousing musical performance by songwriter Peter Himmelman.
The kollel plans to hold the event each year, Holland said.
"Jewish Unity Live seeks to share the joy and unity of Torah study with every Jew."
The local event was part of a series of national programs featuring Jewish performers, films and celebrations. Jewish Unity Live was formed this year to coincide with a worldwide celebration marking the completion of the study of the entire Babylonian Talmud, one page a day for 2,711 days in a row.
All together, more than 100,000 Jews gathered across North America on March 1 to mark the completion of the 11th cycle of the Daf Yomi, or daily page, since the program emerged in 1923.
Rabbi Yitzchok Oratz, organizer of Jewish Unity Live, said that the new program's goal was to "take the energy and excitement of tens of thousands of Jews gathering and extend it to Jews of a more secular background, to allow those who haven't been studying Talmud to join in unity with their brothers and sisters who have."
Events at New York's Madison Square Garden and the Continental Airlines Arena in New Jersey were the largest events to celebrate the completion of the Talmud, packing in some 46,000 Talmud enthusiasts, according to Agudath Israel of America, which organized the events.
Daf Yomi groups also celebrated in Albany, N.Y.; Baltimore; Chicago; Salt Lake City; Birmingham, Ala.; and other U.S. cities.
Another 100,000 took part elsewhere in the world, including Israel, Venezuela, South Africa, Argentina, Russia and Australia.
In Lublin, Poland, some 200 Jews celebrated the tradition at the yeshiva whose rabbi originated the idea of studying the daily page more than 80 years ago.
In New York, the top floors of the Garden were filled with women, most of whom came to support their husbands or sons. They were, some said, taken in by the sheer breadth of the event.
"This is a once in a seven-and-a-half-year event; it's amazing to see this many Jewish people together in one place," said Melissa Gardonyi, 26, from suburban New York.
In Los Angeles, more than 2,600 people filled the Walt Disney Concert Hall, where the early evening event drew a mostly Orthodox crowd and plugged into the East Coast gatherings by satellite.
Michelle Kleinert, Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Jewish community liaison, sat in the women's section, as did fraternal twin sisters Shoshana and Hadassah Klerman. They were among busloads of teenagers from local Orthodox high schools who attended the event.
"This reflects the continuity that we have with Torah throughout the ages, from the beginning of time until now," said Shoshana, a sophomore at the all-girls Beis Yaakov High School in Los Angeles's Fairfax District.
"You think that, OK, the Holocaust happened and these kinds of things happen and people try to wipe us out but we're still here."
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called this year's event "one of the most significant events in American Jewish history; it shows the renaissance of the Jewish people after the Holocaust not only in population but in terms of a recommitment to their heritage."
Leading rabbinic authorities have dedicated the Siyum HaShas as a memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Howard Gluck, a deputy Los Angeles city attorney, came with his two sons even though he did not undertake the lengthy Daf Yomi course.
"I wanted my children to be part of a very unified day celebrating the completion and the starting of the Talmud," he said. "It's an amazing thing to have a program where the same page is being studied in Los Angeles and New York and in Poland and in Moscow and in Israel. The main thing is, we are all part of one family, the Jewish people."
After a fervent mincha, the afternoon prayer service, at the Garden in New York, a series of rabbinical luminaries addressed the crowd from a huge dais on the arena floor that usually is home to the New York Knicks basketball team.
Overhead, beneath championship banners celebrating the Knicks and hockey's Rangers, scenes of gatherings from Calgary to Poland were piped in on large screens.
After the last of the Talmud's 2,711 pages was taught - it came from the order called Niddah and dealt with issues of women's purity - the Madison Square Garden ceremony, which had been somber to that point, took on a wedding-like tone, with loud music and energetic dancing.
As a singer crooned "Siman tov u'mazal tov," thousands of black-clad men rose to their feet, grasped each others' hands and began swaying, dancing and shuffling.
A sea of bobbing black hats animated the arena. Hundreds of men slapped their hands onto fellow revelers' backs and formed a giant human train that circled the Garden's Second Promenade, causing the floor to shake.
Half an hour later, the crowd returned to their seats as the cycle was begun anew, with the teaching of the first page of the first order, Berachot.
When the practice of studying a page of Talmud each day originated, at the First International Congress of Agudath Israel in Vienna, it was designed not only to bring uniformity to the study of Talmud, but unity to Jews worldwide. It seems to have worked.
"Wherever you go in the world, you can find a Daf Yomi shiur and join them, and they're at the same page you're at," said Henry Lowenthal, a Baltimore resident who attended the New York celebration.
Asked how it felt to be among so many Jews who were simultaneously completing study of the Talmud, Lowenthal began to cry.
"It's so emotional, I can't describe it," he said.
JTA intern Jordana Rothstein and David Finnigan of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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