A new report released by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia calculates that approximately 14,000 students attend educational institutions supported by the Moscow-based organization in cooperation with international businessman and philanthropist Lev Leviev’s Ohr Avner Foundation.

According to the report, the FJC supports two higher-educational institutions: the Chabad-Lubavitch run Machon Chamesh University for Jewish women and the Institute of the 21st Century for men, both of which provide classes for free. In addition, 25 secondary Jewish day schools operate under the auspices of the FJC, as well as 28 kindergartens and 46 Sunday schools.

“One of the most important values of our people is to pass on knowledge and traditions to future generations,” explained FJC spokesman Boruch Gorin. “While studying in educational institutions under the auspices of the FJC Russia, young people are becoming closer to their roots and they are actively involved in Jewish communal life.

“The students at our schools, universities and yeshivas are going on to become Jewish leaders,” continued Gorin. “Our graduates serve as rabbis, community administrators, ritual slaughterers, scribes, etc., thereby building the Jewish infrastructure that has become more and more in demand in recent years.”

Airport officials in Munich, Germany, got a lesson in shofar blowing after pulling aside an Israeli rabbi they suspected of illegally transporting forbidden animal trophies.

According to a report in The Jewish Chronicle, Rabbi Mordechai Halperin of Lod was on his way to visit his Nuremberg-based daughter, Chabad-Lubavitch emissary Esther Chitrik, Monday night when he was stopped for carrying his ram’s horn, a ritual item traditionally blown on Rosh Hashanah and the 30 days preceding the Jewish New Year.

Officials “told him to open his bag and loads of security guards came around,” said Gigi Mechlowitz, a fellow Jewish passenger from Manchester, England. “The rabbi asked me how to say shofar in German.”

After investigating the luggage, the guards asked the rabbi to blow into the horn to prove that it was safe.

“He didn’t just give a quick toot,” but instead played a series of traditional blasts, said Mechlowitz. “About 20 to 30 people, mainly airport staff and a few passengers, looked up in awe.”

Transportation officials affixed what is believed to be the world’s largest kosher mezuzah to an interior entranceway of Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport, capping a years-long effort by a village rabbi to impart a hefty dose of spirituality in the country’s biggest passenger hub.

Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Yitzchak Karichali, a ritual scribe in Kfar Chabad, spent three years handwriting biblical verses on the mezuzah’s oversized parchment interior. He painstakingly labored over the tiniest of details to ensure the script’s conformance with the font used by the First Chabad Rebbe, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, in the 18th century.

The completed parchment and case together measure more than a meter in length. A previous record-setting mezuzah – written by Rabbi Reuven Margolinof the National Scribal Center of Ukraine in Dnepropetrovsk – measured in at 40 centimeters in length.

“Ben Gurion Airport is the gateway to Israel so it is a suitable place for a special mezuzah,” airport official Kobi Mor told the Hebrew-language daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot. “Especially before Rosh Hashanah, it is very symbolic and meaningful [for arriving passengers].”

Parents and students cut the ceremonial ribbon strung across the entrance to a classroom at the Chaya Mushka Children’s House in celebration of the Sandy Springs, Ga.’s Jewish Montessori School’s first first-grade class.

Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Yossi and Dassie New, the center’s founders, welcomed the 14 new first-graders and their families, who then helped affix a mezuzah to the classroom’s entrance.

“Walking into the classroom was breathtaking,” parent Leah Sollish said after the ceremony. “The way the classroom has been set up and all the learning materials displayed on the shelves is an outstanding indication of the level of excellence the school is striving to achieve.”

Currently in its 20th year of operation, the Chaya Mushka Children’s House is affiliated with Chabad of Georgia.

This year’s Chabad-Lubavitch run Gan Israel Summer Camp for boys from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, brought together 86 children and 32 counselors from across the country and locations in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Housed at the Balanova Health Resort in the Crimea, the camp featured outdoor activities in the mountain air, including area excursions, soccer and volleyball, boating and swimming, while evening activities fostered Jewish pride and knowledge.

The Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, “emphasized that so much can be accomplished at overnight camps,” said staff member Akiva Romanovsky. “Though some of the campers [came] from cities with established Jewish communities, many came to us from villages where there is [relatively] nothing taking place Jewishly. For them, camp is an island of Jewish life for the entire year.”

Dozens of similar overnight and day camps took place across Ukraine this summer, and hundreds more served thousands of campers elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.

The Jewish community of Dnepropetrovsk is a member of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine.

Jazz composer Daniel Zamir, an Israeli-born saxophonist who found inspiration in the Chabad-Lubavitch community, won a Prime Minister’s Prize for composition. He was this year’s only non-classical composer to win the award.

Zamir, who graduated from the New School in New York in 2002, first showed interest in Jewish, Chasidic and East European folk music as a student. The music strengthened his commitment to Judaism.

“I found that the answer to all my questions was in Judaism,” Zamir told Israel National News. “It allows the person to become bigger than himself, to go higher than himself.”

A month into his new posting as a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary to the city of Stavropol in Russia’s southwest, Rabbi Alexander Nesterov has been making the rounds of government agencies to further cement ties between the local Jewish community and regional authorities.

In addition to his daily responsibilities of meeting with homebound residents, leading synagogue services and preparing for the upcoming High Holidays, Nesterov, who was appointed by Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar, met with officials at the Ministry of Education to evaluate a secondary school pilot project that teaches the history and foundations of world religions.

The rabbi also proposed a cooperative venture between the Jewish community and the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection to assist vulnerable residents, and sat down with leaders at the Ministries of Health and Property Relations, and the local prosecutor’s office.

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

The clock is counting down towards the expected opening of a new Jewish educational center in Leeds, England, that will allow children to walk through a replica of a 19th-century European shtetl.

With a grand opening scheduled for October, the Jewish Heritage Centre for Children has drawn the attention of local press; Ruth Bell, who is coordinating the project with Shoshana Angyalfi, education director at the city’s Chabad-Lubavitch center, spoke to The Jewish Chronicle about the museum.

“Each house in the shtetl shows a different aspect of Jewish life,” Angyalfi said. There’s “the scribe’s house where we learn about the Torah. There is … a candle store where we learn about the different uses for candles.”

The museum will be run under the umbrellas of the Chabad Centre on Shadwell Lane, Moortown.

As the popular kids’ rubber school supplies known as Silly Bandz take the nation by storm, a Florida-based rabbi has released his own brand of shaped rubber bands: Jewly Bandz.

Rabbi Moshe Rabin, executive director of the Rohr Bais Chaya Mushka Academy, a Chabad-Lubavitch run school in the Miami suburb of Tamarac, says he’s using the creation as a teaching tool. Each bag of elastic shapes draws on symbols from the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Chanukah, Purim, Passover, Lag B’Omer and Shavuot.

“When I saw children so excited to collect the latest bands,” says the rabbi, “I knew there was an opportunity here to teach Torah in a fun way.”

According to Rabin, orders have been pouring in from Jewish community centers, Chabad Houses, Jewish Federations, and other organizations.

Chabad-Lubavitch of Edgware, the suburban London Jewish center that recently received approval to construct a ritual bath, hosted 150 people for the facility’s ceremonial groundbreaking.

Coinciding with the 50th birthday celebration of the center’s director, Rabbi Leivi Sudak, the ceremony brought together community members and rabbinical leaders from across London who joined in mixing cement and laying the building’s first stones. Among those attending were Rabbis Nachman Sudak, regional director of Chabad in the United Kingdom; Shmuel Lew, director of the Lubavitch Senior Girls’ School; Levi Raskin, a senior rabbinical authority for the Chabad-Lubavitch UK; and Yitzchok Sandler, director of Aish in Edgware.

“A farmer ploughs his field, cutting open the smooth surface of his land, so that he can receive the blessing of the growth of his produce,” Leivi Sudak said of the groundbreaking’s significance, according to a report on the website of Chabad-Lubavitch UK. “A groundbreaking cuts open the ground, so that it may receive the blessing of the new building. … May all who engage in this project be blessed.”

The new facility will replace a ritual bath destroyed in a fire last year.

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.

Yad B’Yad, a Chabad-Lubavitch organization dedicated to assisting poverty-stricken families in Israel with badly-needed school supplies, has launched its annual backpack drive in advance of the new school year.

At an event last week, director Rabbi Yaakov Gloiberman secured the support of Israel’s national basketball team, whose members signed several backpacks in front of cameras at Tel Aviv’s Nokia stadium.

Proceeds from the sale of the autographed backpacks will help underwrite the distribution campaign, which Gloiberman said would give thousands of students free school supplies.

Frumet Teitelbaum, the Israeli widow of a Brooklyn rabbi murdered in 2008 by terrorists at the Chabad-Lubavitch center in Mumbai, India, may remain in the United States.

According to news reports, the 37-year-old Teitelbaum finally secured a green card under the provisions of post-9/11 law that opens the doors of permanent residency to the families of terror victims. Teitelbaum’s husband, Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum, was one of six executed after gunmen stormed the Chabad House run by Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg.

“My client is elated that she has the right to permanently reside in America, and she has the right to raise her eight American-born children,” Michael Wildes, Teitelbaum’s attorney, told the New York Post.

Teitelbaum had been ordered by authorities to leave the country after they accused her of violating the restrictions on a tourist visa in Februrary.

It’s not a typical scene for a neighborhood basketball court, but for Rabbi Fishel Zaklos and a group of local Jewish men, pairing hoops with prayer is all part of the game.

“Judaism is not only in a synagogue,” Zaklos, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Naples, Fla., pointed out to the Naples Daily News, which profiled the rabbi’s weekly Tuesday-evening game.

Before Zaklos and his pals hit the court, they always precede the match with the donning of the Jewish prayer boxes known as tefillin.