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Members of Montreal’s Russian-speaking Jewish community gathered Sunday to mark two entirely different holidays in a joint celebration: the start of the eight-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah — and Yolka, a secular New Year’s celebration remembered nostalgically by those who grew up in the Soviet Union.

The sold-out event, held at Montreal’s Gelber Conference Centre, was attended by about 450 people.

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The word yolka means spruce tree in Russian — and, when she was growing up in the city of Kiev, in what was then the Soviet Union, the holiday did feature a decorated tree, recalled Montrealer Oxana Pasternak. Children gathered with family, watched performances and received gifts, and she remembers Yolka as the most important holiday of the year.

“You could celebrate with family,” Pasternak said. Other holidays — International Workers Day on May 1, say, or Nov. 7, the Day of the Great October Socialist Revolution — featured marches and gatherings in the central square and were “completely political, from the Stalin era.”