“What IS daf yoineh?” you might ask. As a child, I used to hear people, usually of the Satmar domination, call Daf yomi that. People with a heavy Hungarian Hasidic accent
tend to pronounce words that end with a chirik, with a shva. For example, the
word כללי
(as in תיקון כללי or שיעור כללי) is pronounced as kluleh, and יומי
is pronounced as Yoimeh. At one point, someone thought it’ll be funny to call it Daf Hayoineh instead of Daf Hayoimeh,
and the name stuck.
So who was that someone? In the recently
published “Ginat Veradim” (vol. 15 5772), a quarterly published by the
Zaalonite Satmar fraction, a collection of stories “on the
subject of our rabbis’ opposition to Daf Yomi” was featured, in honor of the upcoming Siyum
Hashas. Here’s one gem:
סיפר הרב הגאון המפורסם מוה"ר משה ארי'
לעוו ז"ל הרב מטעמעשוואר שהרה"ק מנאסויד הי' מזלזל בדף היומי, והיה
קוראו בלשון גנאי "דף היונה"...
(מפי
נכדו הרב אא"ד הי"ו שממעו ממנו)
The rav of Timișoara, R. Moshe Aryeh Lev related that the holy Rabbi [Abraham Joshua Freund] of Năsăud used to disparage the daf yomi, and he used to
call it in a derogatory way “daf hayoineh”…
I don't know if this is true or not, but if it is, then this might be the
origin of the term, or at least one of the origins.
But I was surprised to see the following letter in Hamodia’s
weekly magazine “Inyan” (Vol. XV, issue 715 p. 4):
A short while ago you printed a
letter (Parshas Shelach/June 13) claiming that Harav Meir Shapiro’s status as
the originator of Daf Yomi was in question and stating that “there are many
proofs for it”. I would like to make the following points. …. [T]here is a
well-known story (cited in at least one place in Aleinu L’shabei’ach, Shemos,
p. 548) that after Harav Shapiro became famous, he met someone from his
hometown and asked if the other person remembered that they had played together
as children. When the man replied in the affirmative, he asked, “Do you
remember that I used to dream of initiating a program of Shas for all of Klal
Yisrael, and the children used to laugh at me calling it ‘daf hayoneh’?” The
man said he remembered that too. Rav Shapiro responded, “I’m telling you this
because it is important to remember never to laugh at the dreams of a child!”
In addition to the obvious lesson
in this story, it seems clear that he was already thinking of the idea when he
was very young. ….
Leibel Klein
U.K.
It would seem from this letter that the derogatory term was
born together with the idea of Daf Yomi itself. Alas, to my non-surprise, looking up the story in Aleinu Leshabe’ach I found
that he tells the story all right but without the part about the children
calling it daf hayoneh. That part is most obviously an anachronism added by Mr. Klein.
Not that I would trust Aleinu Leshabe’ach's version of the story any more than I trust Mr. Leibel
Klein, considering the outrageous stories the book is fond of telling kayadua, but the fact that Aleinu Leshabeach records the legend without the part about daf hayoneh is definitely telling.
Speaking of the originator of the Daf Yomi idea, let me just
point you in the direction of S.’ post on the matter here. It is interesting to
not though, that what S. cites was already mentioned in an article in Yeshurun
by R. Eliezer Katzman who thanks Prof. Shneur Zalman Lehman for pointing it
out.