The website of the Hadran group features a big picture of a female officer of the Israel Defense Forces poring over a Talmud tome. “This is the entire Torah, the entire principle of all,” said Rabbanit Michelle Farber Cohen, the co-founder of the group and the initiator of the Jan. 5 gathering to mark the completion of a cycle of Talmud study by women in the Jerusalem Convention Center. “We are educating women to participate in and contribute to every field, including those that were once closed to us.”

The Talmud was compiled after the destruction of the Second Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD. It is a collection of complex interpretations of the Torah and Jewish law, put together both in Babylon (Babylonian Talmud, compiled in what is now Iraq by about 500 AD) and in the Land of Israel (Jerusalem Talmud, completed about 200 years earlier). 

The 37 tractates of the Babylonian Talmud are considered the foundation stone of halachic Jewish literature. About a century ago, in 1923, Rabbi Meir Shapira of Lublin instituted the Daf Yomi cycle, in which one page of the Talmud is studied daily across the Jewish world, completing a cycle every seven and a half years. Celebrations to mark the completion of the cycle are held around the world.

Until recently, only men participated in this tradition and celebrated the completion of the cycle. “Men didn’t want to share their exclusive authority with women. The study of the Talmud is empowering. It makes it possible to gain authority as a rabbi and a religious judge, among other things,” Rachel Elior, a professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told Al-Monitor.