Forward article from July 9th, 2004, mentions Mayyim Hayyim as an interdenominational mikveh
Welcome to the next installment of the Archive Deep Dive! I’ve been slowly but surely making my way through Mayyim Hayyim’s records these past few months, and every day I uncover a new piece of the puzzle that forms the story of this organization. To be fair, I tend to find even the most seemingly mundane records or artifacts interesting, but there have truly been some stellar finds over the past weeks!
For example, I recently came across a folder full of press clippings related to Mayyim Hayyim, most of which were from 2004 (the year Mayyim Hayyim opened). In that folder was a photocopy of the Der Yiddish-Vinkl column of the longstanding independent Jewish publication Forward, dated July 9th, 2004. The column, subtitled “A Weekly Briefing on the Mother Tongue,” offered a blurb of news from the Jewish community alongside a related poem in both Yiddish and English.
This particular edition’s Der Yiddish-Vinkl mentions a certain “interdenominational mikveh [that had] opened up in Newton, Mass.,” and featured a Yiddish and English poem by the column’s frequent contributor Stanley Siegelman. While I’m not fluent in Yiddish, I can certainly appreciate the time and effort Siegelman put into writing and translating the poems in honor of Mayyim Hayyim and mikva’ot all over the world. His use of both languages is masterful, and it gives us a lovely insight into what Mayyim Hayyim’s reception looked like in Jewish media at the time.
Gabrielle Keen
Archivist
Pronouns: she/they