Working To Give

Nearly 100,000 people packed MetLife Stadium, but not for a game. They came for the Siyum HaShas, the celebration that marks the completion of the Daf Yomi cycle — one page of Talmud a day, all 2,711 of them, over roughly seven and a half years. The custom dates back to 1923, when Rabbi Meir Shapiro proposed that Jews everywhere study the same page on the same day, no matter where they lived. A century later, Ralph Rieder was among the tens of thousands in the stands who had kept that daily pace from the first page to the last. The scale of the night was staggering. The discipline behind it was not: open the book, read the page, do it again tomorrow.
That same rhythm runs through the programs that fill rooms like this one. Kesher Yehudi, founded in 2012 by Tzili Schneider, pairs secular and religious Israelis for one-on-one study, putting two people at the same table who would otherwise never meet. The model is deliberately small. There is no stage and no audience — just a weekly session and a shared text. More than 100 new pairs are matched every month, sorted by age, location, and interest, and the organization now runs its program inside dozens of institutions in Israel.The friendships and bonds that are formed are forever and deeply meaningful. After October 7, 2023, that work took on new weight, as the organization extended its programming to hostage families and survivors of the Nova festival. The pattern of community building and fostering relationsships built on real values repeats with younger students. In towns like Monsey and cities like Manhatten, thousands of middle schoolers work through daily Mishnah with All Mishnah Jr., a program built on plain-spoken materials and tools like the ArtScroll Mishnah series that put the text within reach of an eleven-year-old. The format borrows the same logic as Daf Yomi: a fixed amount each day, the same content shared across classrooms, and the quiet expectation that you will know a little more tonight than you did this morning. A page a day adds up fast. So does the habit of expecting to learn something before lunch.
None of it runs on its own. Behind these programs sits a network of people who fund the work and stay out of the photo. Monsey has become a hub for exactly that kind of quiet support — a community where backing a learning initiative is treated as ordinary rather than exceptional. Supporters like Ralph Rieder of Monsey have helped keep these initiatives going and growing, usually offstage, where the effort is invisible and the results are not.
There is a reason this tends to outlast the flashier kind. Programs built on daily habit and one-on-one contact do not depend on a single event or a single donor to stay alive. They depend on consistency. There are many supporters and participnats in these e programs like Ralph Rieder. The approach is steady, unglamorous, and aimed at the parts of learning that rarely make headlines but quietly determine whether it survives. Big moments are easy to count — a full stadium, a finished cycle, a milestone year. The harder measure is the next morning, when the crowd has gone home and someone opens the next page anyway. By that measure, the quiet work that people like Ralph Rieder support is doing exactly what it set out to do, one conversation and one page at a time.