Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin רבי מאיר שפירא מלובלין

Rabbi of Sanok, then Piotrków, then Lublin; a deputy in the Polish Sejm for the Jewish party. But he is remembered for two things, and both from one root: the thought that Torah must be learned by everyone together.

The first is the Daf Yomi. At the Agudah congress in Vienna in 1923 he proposed something simple: let all the Jews of the world learn the same page of Talmud every day. Then a Jew from Warsaw and a Jew from New York, meeting, would be on the same page. The first cycle began on Rosh Hashanah 1923 and ended seven and a half years later; since then the count has not been broken for a day.

The second is Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin, opened in 1930: a building raised on money gathered across the world, with a dormitory, a library and a model of the Temple—a yeshiva where a student did not have to beg his bread from house to house. He died at forty-six, three years after the opening; the Germans destroyed the yeshiva, and the Daf Yomi outlived everything.