17-year-old Efrat girl may be youngest woman ever to complete Daf Yomi Talmud cycle

As hundreds of thousands of Jews worldwide celebrate the completion of the seven-and-a-half-year long cycle of daily Talmud study, and as women for the first time in history held their own celebration in Jerusalem, one 17-year-old girl is believed to be the youngest woman to ever mark this achievement.

Hila Schlakman of Efrat, a senior at Ohr Torah Stone’s Neve Chana High School, began this learning cycle with her father after her older brother had completed the previous one with their father in 2012. Though her original plan was only to learn with her father until the celebration of her Bat Mitzvah, her piqued interest drove her to continue.

Over the course of the first four years of the 2,711-day cycle, she worked with her father’s schedule, sometimes sacrificing and adapting her own social plans in order to gain a mastery of the basics and set the foundation for her future learning. For sleepovers at friends, she’d need to plan to arrive late in order to study with her father beforehand, and in order to travel for summer vacation, she and her father would learn ahead so as not to miss a page. Later on, she would be joined by her younger sister and ultimately their grandfather, too, sometimes learning together and at other times on their own.

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