There are also Daf Yomi phone apps and lively discussions in Facebook groups.
In Jerusalem on Sunday, Hadran, an organization that advances Talmud study for women and that Ms. Cohen Farber co-founded, is holding a first global women’s Siyum celebration. The “Siyum,” or completion of the 13th cycle of the Daf Yomi, falls Saturday. About 3,000 people, mostly women, are expected to attend, and it will be streamed live to an international audience.
The 1,500-year-old Talmud is a meandering text including interpretations of biblical Halakha, or Jewish law, ethics and narratives full of digressions and arguments among rabbis.
It largely depicts women as a husband’s property. And the final volume, Niddah, deals with the intricacies of a woman’s physiology and anatomy and the laws of family purity, including the prohibition of intercourse with a menstruating woman.
Ilana Kurshan, a Jerusalem resident originally from Long Island, said she did not have “the anger some women have” over the Talmud’s depiction of women as property.
“I feel so blessed to be a Jewish woman in the 21st century,” she said.
A Hasidic rabbi in Lublin, Poland, conceived the Daf Yomi tradition nearly 100 years ago, setting the order of study as a way of unifying and synchronizing an increasingly sprawling Jewish diaspora by having Jews focus on the same page each day.
A few women first began the Daf Yomi program several decades ago. Talmud study has since been introduced in some religious girls’ schools, and there has been growing interest in secular academia and modern Orthodox circles.
Talmud was often considered too difficult and less relevant for women than other texts like the weekly Torah portion.
Source : Nytimes
