When I was 12 years old, I bought a large paperback copy of The Guinness Book of World Records. It gave me hours of entertainment. I loved flipping through its pages to discover who was the tallest, heaviest, or shortest person in the world—and who held records that ranged from the impressive to the downright absurd.

One record, in particular, has stuck with me all these years: the man with the world’s longest mustache. I still remember the photo of him proudly posing alongside his whiskers.

Those childhood memories came rushing back recently when I learned that on November 21, 2025, Temple Emanu-El’s Streicker Center in New York City organized a “Big Shabbat” dinner at the Javits Center that drew an astounding 2,761 participants. The event officially entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest Shabbat dinner ever held.

This wasn’t the first time Jews gathered in record-setting numbers for Shabbat. In 2015, during the European Maccabi Games in Berlin, approximately 2,322 people came together for a communal Shabbat meal—then the largest on record. And the year before that, in 2014, an event in Tel Aviv organized by White City Shabbat and Chabad-Lubavitch brought 2,226 participants to the table.

All of this got me wondering: What other Guinness World........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)