But still missing in Plantation was a mikveh, essential to every Jewish community, and with Jewish involvement on the rise, Plantation’s growing number of observant women were forced to go elsewhere for this staple of Jewish family life. A Hebrew School, holiday programs, and weekly classes established by the Posners meant that the local Jewish community could almost hold its own. It wouldn’t take long for services to attract a minyan twice daily at the center and draw 100 people on a typical Shabbat. But that did not deter the Posners from generating Jewish interest and lively involvement through the small, storefront Chabad House. Home to 10,000 Jews-more than 20% of Plantation’s population-Jewish awareness in this city was at an all-time low.
When Rabbi Mendy and Chanie Posner arrived in the upscale city of Plantation, Florida, nearly ten years ago, to what Chanie describes as a “spiritual desert,” a local mikveh did not even seem like a remote possibility. And when a thoroughly modern, middle-class American community decides to support a mikveh, it’s fair to surmise that the tide has finally turned. But a determined effort in the past few decades to educate Jewish women has proven a remarkable willingness on their part to reclaim this mitzvah. Many Jewish women have never even heard of mikveh for many others, it is a tradition shrouded in misconception. Archeological digs from ancient times through the middle ages, and recent discoveries of mikvehs hidden in cellars throughout the former communist bloc, offer abundant evidence that this is one of those mitzvahs that Jewish people kept to stubbornly, even in the worst of times.īut as was true of so many Jewish rituals, mikveh became a casualty of modern Jewish alienation.
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