In what community leaders are calling a moment of historic significance, Jewish residents of Bryansk, Russia, an administrative center 235 miles southwest of Moscow, paraded down the city’s main street in celebration of their first new Torah scroll in a century.

Commissioned in honor of Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, the slain directors of the Chabad-Lubavitch center in Mumbai, India, the “Torah Scroll for the Unity of Jews in the Former Soviet Union” was launched by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Rabinowitz of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar supervised the project.

The Jewish community of Bryansk is a member of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia.