Community rededicates Greater Hartford mikveh May 4 

By Cindy Mindell

WEST HARTFORD – Rabbinic sources teach that a Jewish community may sell a Torah scroll to fund the building of a communal mikveh, so central to Jewish life is the ritual purification pool.

Over the centuries of Jewish wandering and diaspora, the pivotal role of the mikveh was lost to many Jewish communities. The last decade has seen a revival of the mitzvah of immersion, exemplified in the U.S. by Mayyim Hayyim, an ultra-modern community mikveh and education center in Newton, Mass.

In the Hartford area, the newly refurbished Mikveh Bess Israel is set to celebrate its rededication on May 4, the culmination of a community-wide effort to revive and embrace an underused resource.

Mikveh Bess Israel in West Hartford.

Now at 61 North Main St. in West Hartford, the Hartford mikveh was founded in 1852 by the same group of Jewish immigrants who had established Congregation Bess Israel, the “Barbour Street Shul,” five years earlier. By the turn of the century, structural and ritual problems necessitated a new mikveh, built by the community on Magnolia Street in Hartford. Fifty years later, Holocaust survivors saw in the mikveh a source of renewal in their adopted home. The mikveh relocated to Blue Hills Avenue and ultimately, in 1978, to the small house it now occupies, taking on the name of Congregation Bess Israel in 1984.

The mikveh, run by a board and staffed by a shomeret or female guide, has been used since then for conversions by all rabbis in the community and regular immersion by observant Jewish women and men.

By 2010, the facility had fallen into such disrepair that the board saw an opportunity to educate and rally the Jewish community.

And rally it did. Donations came in from Jewish communal organizations and synagogues, from foundations and families and individuals, all to be honored at the rededication.

“This large and widespread support shows how the mikveh is indeed the foundation for the continuity of the Jewish people through the unique mitzvah of taharat ha-mishpacha,” says board member Vera Schwarz. “The obligation of building a mikveh connects the present-day generation back to valiant men and women who faced great financial, physical, and religious challenges in order to safeguard this key institution. It also links us forward to generations of Jews to come who will be using this community mikveh for maintaining the integrity of Jewish family life as well as for bringing Jews by choice into our community through ritual immersion. Without the mikveh, we would be like a frail and dying person thirsting for water that was once flowing generously nearby.”

The inside of Mikveh Bess Israel.

Board member Miriam Gopin, co-director of Chabad House of Greater Hartford, is a longtime mikveh educator, guiding generations of young women through the Jewish laws of taharat ha-mishpacha, translated as “family purity,” seen by many as an inadequate term.

“In the times of the Temple in Jerusalem, there was a great emphasis on purity and impurity,” Gopin explains. “Whoever was impure could not come to the Temple to offer a sacrifice or participate in any way. Tahara and tumah – purity and impurity – are spiritual concepts and we use those English words as translation but they are not good descriptions. Anything that’s got to do with holiness or godliness – the source of life – is something that’s pure; you equate purity with things that are alive. The source of impurity is a dead body, something that has no life, because the godly vitality has left the body.”

The Hebrew word mikveh appears for the first time in the Book of Genesis, in the phrase mikveh hamayim, the “gathering of the waters” which God calls seas. The laws of purity and impurity are laid out in Leviticus, including immersion in a mikveh. The Torah describes varying degrees of impurity. When a person was at a certain degree of impurity, depending on how severe it was – contact with a dead body, being in the house of a dead person, contact with a dead animal – the duration and content of that person’s purification ritual would vary. In the case of contact with a dead body, there were various additional steps required, including immersion in a mikveh containing 40 se’ah of water, the basic amount necessary for a person to immerse his or her entire body.

“Since the Temple is destroyed, most of the uses for the mikveh don’t apply because we’re all in a state of impurity; we don’t have the Temple or the ashes of the red heifer to purify ourselves,” says Gopin. “One law that is active in using the mikveh is for a married woman and for conversion. When a person takes that very serious step to convert and acquire a new soul, it’s like becoming a new being. One of the steps to mark that transition is immersion.”

Adequately explaining why and how married women use the mikveh is beyond the scope of this article, but the “on one foot” conclusion is that the mikveh keeps the Jewish marriage strong. “Therefore, the mikveh is really the bedrock of the Jewish community and is much more important than building a synagogue,” Gopin says. “Mikveh really has kept the Jewish family strong and the center of Jewish life is the Jewish family and that’s why it’s so crucial.” Men can also use the mikveh, but by choice or tradition rather than by Jewish law.

Chabad House and Mikveh Bess Israel hold educational programs and small discussion groups on the subject of the mikveh. The May 4 event, open to men, women, and children, will be both commemorative and educational, a primer for the first-time visitor and a reintroduction for the initiated.

Another passionate mikveh supporter and board member is Rabbi Ilana Garber of Beth El Temple in West Hartford, whose mikveh bona fides include writing the curriculum for the women who serve as guides at Mayyim Hayyim.

“I love the mikveh and I’m honored to serve on the board,” Garber says. “It has really been incredible for me personally to work with this board, to get to know some of the other people in this community who care as deeply for mikveh as I do, and to witness the support of the local congregations. I believe that it is our community’s duty to support the mikveh in any way we can, so I will continue to educate people about the mikveh – women, men, and children – and to bring anyone who wishes to tour or immerse. The mikveh belongs to each and every one of us.”

Mikveh Bess Israel Open House and Dedication: Sunday, May 4, 3-5 p.m., 61 North Main St., West Hartford | Open to all; parking on side streets | Info: bessisrael.org / (860) 521-9946.