Summer Start Marks End of Year for Schools Across Russia

Jewish communities across Russia marked the end of the school year with celebrations and youth field trips.

In the west Siberian city of Omsk, a special ceremony bid farewell to the students of the Ohr Avner Chabad Day School, which opened a year ago with the backing of regional Gov. Leonid Polezhaev.

“I wish the best of luck to our graduates, and I am hopeful that our school will once again be full of new faces” next year, said Irina Shpakina, director of the school.

During the ceremony, departing high school students received their diplomas as their proud parents looked on. Staff presented awards to a handful of students selected for their academic ability and leadership skills.

Elementary school students, meanwhile, recited poems and sang for the crowd.

Celebrations in other parts of the country echoed the assembly in Omsk. In Volgograd, for instance, multi-colored balloons filled a room of the Ohr Avner Chabad Day School for that institution’s end-of-year ceremony, and a multimedia presentation catalogued the history of the Jewish school.

Jewish youth from Tula, Russia, took a trek to nearby Bogoroditska to celebrate the end of their school year.

Students in Tula, meanwhile, celebrated the end of the year by trekking to a palace in nearby Bogoroditska during the holiday of Lag B’Omer. Participants of the trip, which was sponsored by the Jewish community of Tula’s Youth Club, received baseball caps and T-shirts.

In Omsk, Chief Rabbi Osher Krichevsky, a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary, told celebrants that while the school year was over, their Jewish learning must continue.

“Don’t forget,” he said, “the Torah teaches us that with every end, there is also a beginning.”

The network of Ohr Avner schools throughout the former Soviet Union are sponsored by the Ohr Avner Foundation and underwritten by philanthropists Lev and Olga Leviev.