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"Mekom Torah" in Hebrew means "a place of Torah."
The name comes from a passage in Pirkei Avot, Chapter 6 Mishna 9:
Rabbi Yosi ben Kisma said:
One time I was walking on the road when a man ran into me and gave me a shalom and I gave him back a shalom.
He said to me, “Rabbi, from what makom (place) are you?”
I said to him, “I am from a great city of wise people and scribes.”
He said to me, “Rabbi, do you want to live with us in our makom? I’ll give you thousands and thousands of gold coins and precious stones and pearls.”
I said to him, “If you gave me all the gold and silver and precious stones and pearls in the world, I would dwell nowhere except in a mekom Torah – a place of Torah.”
Like Rabbi Yosi, we want to live in a place of Torah. But what makes someplace a mekom Torah?
In some traditional Jewish communities, the phrase has come to be associated with a place that has a kosher butcher, a ritual bath, and a daily minyan.
We are using the phrase in a broader sense. For us, a mekom Torah is a place where people study Torah in a way that is connected to their real lives. Through our work with Mekom Torah, we hope to transform Jewish identities, to make our neighborhoods into destinations with a reputation for thriving Jewish life, to make the Delaware County area truly a place of Torah.
Question: Isn't the Hebrew word for "place" makom? Did we spell it wrong?!
Answer: When it is combined with another word, to mean "a place of," makom becomes mekom. (Actually, m'kom would match the Hebrew pronunciation even more precisely, but that is too hard to spell.) We say that the words mekom and Torah are in smichut - they are leaning against each other. When this happens in Hebrew, the first word in the pair squishes up a little, into what is called "construct form." Here is another example of smichut : The Hebrew word for "house" is bayit. The construct form for bayit is beit. Thus Beit Yisrael means "The House of Israel."
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