St Albans United Synagogue was the setting for a unique event, when, following a recent Shabbat morning service, the first siyyum ever recorded in the shul’s 75-year history was hosted by its new Midweek Mishnah study group.
Celebrating the completion of their year-long study of the opening tractate of Mishnah were the eight founding members of the group, who followed tradition by sponsoring a lunch for community members, at which the final paragraph of the tractate was analysed and explained by the group’s leader, David Solomon.
The remarkable feature of the achievement, said SAUS’s Rabbi Daniel Sturgess in congratulating the group, was that it was initiated not at his instigation, but at the entirely spontaneous suggestion of a single community member who gathered together a few of his like-minded fellow-congregants, none of whom admitted to any special qualifications or standards of religious observance, to meet and study one evening a fortnight, initially with no particular goal in mind but purely for the love of learning itself.
Now, with one tractate and a year’s experience in the bag, they are ready to embark on a second – and to welcome to the group any new members enthused by their success and their evident pride and pleasure in their history-making feat.