by DeDe Jacobs-Komisar Before I started as Development Manager at Mayyim Hayyim last year, I was afraid that the daily demands of fundraising would make it hard to always appreciate the amazing things that happen here every day. I feared that I would begin to see people only in terms of their “capacity,” as we say, […]
Continue Readingby Lisa Berman, Mikveh and Education Director Q: How do you know if you are succeeding at running a warm, welcoming, open-minded mikveh? A: You get a lot of really interesting phone calls and you love answering them. In my role as Mikveh (& Education) Director at Mayyim Hayyim, I love fielding calls because inevitably it […]
Continue ReadingBy Lisa Berman, Mikveh and Education Director Q: How do you know if you are succeeding at running a warm, welcoming, open-minded mikveh? A: You get a lot of really interesting phone calls and you love answering them. In my role as Mikveh (& Education) Director at Mayyim Hayyim, I love fielding calls because inevitably it […]
Continue Readingby Carrie Bornstein If you know about the mikveh, you’re probably aware that there are any number of reasons why a person might feel, well, less than comfortable with the idea. Let’s be honest here – the mikveh is not our easiest of rituals. Some people have anxiety about water, or with nudity, for that […]
Continue Readingby Leeza Negelev, Associate Director of Education After my education program with Temple Emunah two weeks ago, I went looking through our records for primary source materials about our mechanical lift. I came across a very moving letter we received from Rabbi Peter Stein. In this letter, Rabbi Stein writes about how he was able to share mikveh immersion […]
Continue Readingby Leeza Negelev, Associate Director of Education When I teach about mikveh at Mayyim Hayyim, my students learn about the difference between a ma’ayan mikveh, (a natural, spring-fed or flowing mikveh) and a bor mikveh, (a human-made, part-of-the-ground pit mikveh). At which point, I stop to ask: “So, why might you care that we are able to build a mikveh indoors?” My students have […]
Continue Readingby Walton Clark, Office Assistant I have an app on my phone called Duolingo. It’s a free language learning app that teaches you a language through taking quizzes. As you take the quizzes new material is introduced with simple questions. As I considered what I wanted to write about for this blog post, I thought about how […]
Continue Readingby Carrie Bornstein It’s Slingshot release day – one of my favorites each year. Mayyim Hayyim is celebrating our inclusion in the guide once again as well as being featured in their supplement on Women and Girls. And this time around we’ve hit a special milestone: ten years in a row of being included in the guide. […]
Continue Readingby Carrie Bornstein Last week, Cindy shared how she found meaning at Mayyim Hayyim in 2004 after being turned away from her local mikveh when she told them she’d be marrying another woman. I was inspired by her words – but what struck me more was her willingness to give Mayyim Hayyim a chance when she so […]
Continue Readingby Talia Jaffe, Education Intern There is a decision a person has to make every time they walk into a room. They have to decide if they want to be the funny version of themselves, the nice, the frustrated, the understanding. They have to decide which of their identities they want to put forth. What […]
Continue Readingby Cindy Kalish It is hard to believe that it has been 10 years. A decade since marriage between two people of the same gender became legal in Massachusetts. It is also a decade since I immersed in a mikveh for the first time. In December 2003, a friend of mine suggested that I consider […]
Continue Readingby Sherri Goldman, Administrative and Finance Director It was my joy a few weeks ago to attend my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah in Atlanta. After an impressive Torah reading, his father and my brother, Rabbi Eric Levy, gave a sermon about nonconforming conformity among the Jewish people. I hadn’t heard of nonconforming conformity before, and I […]
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