Iwas a young boy when I first started to observe the custom of staying up to learn Torah the whole night of Shavuot. My first memories are of a few people who drank black coffee and ate cheesecake to fight back sleep in shul. In between trips to the refreshment stand, the learned would horeve over a blatt Gemara - a page of Talmud - with a study partner through the night. But the rank and file, many of them survivors of Hitler’s Holocaust, the plumbers and wallpaper hangers and tailors and grocery men of the shul, listened to Torah lectures from earnest, suited rabbis, before they nodded off early or went home.
