He was a child prodigy in pre war Hungary and by the time he had reached his Bar Mitzvah he had memorized hundreds of pages of Talmud. We agreed to meet at Hebrew University after one of his seminars.

That day, over 90,000 Jews filled the stadium in celebration of the completion of a 7 1/2-year journey of learning the Talmud by reading a double-sided page per day known as Daf Yomi. Most of the ...

Farber, 47, is one of the people trying to change that. For the past 7 1/2 years, she has taught a page of Talmud a day to a small group of women at her home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Raanana.

Reading Talmud requires sophisticated textual interpretive abilities and has its own particular characteristics. But how do students learn to read Talmud? How can we assess that process? What can we ...