ASHDOD, Israel — As dusk fell in a port city in southern Israel, Roman Kaminker’s neighborhood pop-up shop twinkled with a bountiful display of Santa dolls and synthetic spruce trees adorned with tinsel and baubles.

Mr. Kaminker’s store in Ashdod was catering to those shopping for Novy God, the Russian end-of-year celebration when families traditionally gather before midnight on Dec. 31 to feast on delicacies from the old country like herring, caviar and jellied calf’s foot, and toast in the New Year with vodka and bubbly.

“This has no connection to religion,” declared Mr. Kaminker, 39, who emigrated from Moldova in the mid-1990s, and was eager to avoid any misunderstandings that his shop was somehow linked to Christmas. “You won’t find any Marias or crosses here,” he added. “That wasn’t allowed in the Soviet Union.”

Nearly 30 years after the start of the great wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union, which began in 1989 and brought nearly a million Russian speakers to Israel by the end of the 1990s, the Novy God holiday has become something of a barometer to gauge the place of these immigrants in Israeli society.