When much of the country will be glued to the Olympics at the end of the month, a rather different kind of marathon will be celebrated at the Royal Festival Hall.

A large crowd from Stamford Hill and other Torah-true centres will come to the South Bank to mark the end of a study cycle of the entire Babylonian Talmud.

The Daf Yomi programme, which originated in Poland in the 1920s, entails the study of a folio of Talmud every day, over the course of seven-and-a-half years. Tens of thousands around the world take part.

In 1997, the London siyum (religious party) for Daf Yomi was held in a gym in Finsbury Park: seven-and-a-half years later it moved to Alexandra Palace and this time it has reached the capital’s cultural heartland.