Never too old to begin

When the Beth Sholom Daf Yomi shuir completed the 24th page of the tractate of Zevachim, concluding their learning of the entire Talmud, it was a joyous occasion — especially for Harold Wohl. Before the shuir began seven and a half years ago, Wohl, 91, had barely opened up a gemarah.

“Don’t make me into a tzaddik,” Wohl sternly told a reporter (as sternly as the gentle Wohl ever gets).

Wohl was born in 1919 in Lennox Hill Hospital, and didn’t have much of a yeshiva education, he said. “My father didn’t have enough money to send me to yeshiva,” Wohl explained last Friday afternoon, two days before he planned to travel to Florida for the winter. “He was borrowing five dollars for me in high school … They should have tried to give me a better education, but I’m doing my best to make up for it.”

Wohl also didn’t get much of a chance to learn when he was drafted into the U.S. Army or when he finished NYU Law School in 1946 and definitely not once he launched his own successful clothing company in 1976.

Daf Yomi is the practice of learning a single two-sided page of gemarah every day to finish the entire Talmud in a seven-and-a-half year cycle. While the idea originated in the 1920s, only recently, with the publication of the complete translated Artscroll series of Talmud, has it achieved widespread popularity. The next official completion is scheduled for August 2012, but for those who picked up the sequence mid-volume, celebrations are smaller, though just as meaningful.

The Beth Sholom Daf Yomi shuir began when Rabbi Yale Fishman, a member of the shul, was asked to teach a Daf Yomi class while on vacation. When he returned to New York, Rabbi Fishman brought up the idea of a shuir with Rabbi Kenneth Hain, of Beth Sholom. Rabbi Hain responded enthusiastically to the idea, and the responsibilities for giving the daily shuir were divided between Rabbi Fishman and Rabbi Yechial Weberman, who teaches at the Davis Renov Stahler Yeshiva High School for Boys.