The 2020-2021 school year began Tuesday morning in most schools around Israel.
According to the Education Ministry, 332 schools and 710 preschools have remained closed due to their location in "red" cities where coronavirus infection rates are high. A total of 962 students and teachers have active cases of coronavirus, and 5,519 students and teachers are in quarantine.
Those students attending school will be learning according to the Learning Safely plan, which integrates frontal learning in small groups with distance learning.
Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion arrived at the city's Geulim school and participated in the welcome ceremony for its first graders.
"This is an exciting day," he told Arutz Sheva. "We have 275,000 students in the city. That's a very large number and we are responsible to ensure that they all learn in the most organized fashion, and we worked on that for the past two months."
"It's very exciting and it's a great responsibility, and to my happiness, studies have commenced in all locations.
"Parents are rightfully concerned and I am also concerned for my grandson. They say, 'happy is the person who is always afraid,' but 98% of the students came today. We will need to live another few months in the shadow of coronavirus, and we will make every effort to live with it."