Yeshiva

A yeshiva is a Jewish institution of higher religious learning devoted to the intensive study of the Talmud, rabbinic literature and Jewish law, traditionally organized around the chavruta method of paired study and led by senior rabbinic scholars called roshei yeshiva. Yeshivas developed as central institutions of rabbinic Judaism in medieval Babylonia and later flourished across Europe, especially in Lithuania and Poland, where great yeshivas produced much of the rabbinic leadership of Ashkenazi Jewry before the Holocaust devastated that world; the yeshiva tradition was subsequently rebuilt and expanded in Israel and the United States. As a socialization institution, the yeshiva has functioned not only to train rabbis and scholars but to transmit religious identity, textual literacy and communal norms across generations of observant Jewish communities.