By Nora Smolonsky *This post originally appeared in Fresh Ideas from HBI, the blog of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. As someone who is not a practicing Jew, I felt reservations before going to Mayyim Hayyim, a mikveh in Newton, MA. To be honest, I was not entirely sure what a mikveh was. I was worried that […]
Continue Readingby Molly Bajgot I knew I wanted to go to the mikveh for the first time when I made the decision to move out of Boston to Arizona. It was an amorphous transition with not much time to acknowledge it; I knew I needed a physical marker to help ground this enormous change, but I wasn’t expecting the […]
Continue Readingby David Berman I’ve immersed at Mayyim Hayyim three times: once before my Bar Mitzvah, once before I left for a semester in Israel when I was a sophomore in high school, and once last September before a gap year program in Israel. Going to Mayyim Hayyim when I was 13 was my mother’s idea. […]
Continue Readingby Laura Conrad Mandel Life isn’t about stuff, it’s about experiences. Between baby showers and wedding showers, adoptions and graduations, I find myself constantly in need of gifts for friends and family who tend to have just about all the stuff they need, and for whom I know that something off a registry doesn’t typically […]
Continue ReadingBy Carrie Bornstein, Executive Director People often ask us, “Is there anything like Mayyim Hayyim in Israel?” We certainly let them know about Mikveh Sh’maya, run by Rabbi Haviva Ner-David at Kibbutz Hannaton, and the innovative work happening at the Eden Center in Jerusalem, led by Naomi Marmon-Grumet. Outside of that, however, the mikveh scene is somewhat […]
Continue Readingby Janine Herrera To understand why my immersion at Mayyim Hayyim was so transformative, one would first need to understand the journey I’ve been on. I made the decision to convert because the synagogue and community I belong to was inclusive, open, and committed to accepting everyone. They unabashedly embraced me as part of their community. […]
Continue Readingby Karen Suzukamo My Story In 1984 my husband and I had a plan. We’d move to Minnesota for exciting jobs, work hard, explore the area, and then move back to the west coast. The thirty years since then made us into Minnesotans and taught us a thing or two about the possibilities and the […]
Continue Readingby Rachel Eisen, Director of Annual Giving Let me tell you a little secret of mine. I actually hate getting in the water. I’m not a fan of summer, in part because I’d rather be cold than hot, but also because I hate swimming. I can’t remember if I liked it as a kid or […]
Continue Readingby Yasmine Moideen “A donde?” “Por la calle y la Calle trece.” My friends and I entered the dented, sky-blue, 1954 Bel Aire landing on creaky seats, shutting the doors harder than we should have. We were in Havana, Cuba on a trip with our synagogue. It was nearing Shabbat, around 6:30 pm. That day, […]
Continue Readingby Leah Robbins, Administrative and Marketing Assistant Almost two months have passed since I began working at Mayyim Hayyim. I have settled into my desk, built a challenging, but civil relationship with our computer systems and their quirks, and am actively growing as a member of this extraordinary team of women who keep Mayyim Hayyim […]
Continue Readingby Bonita Sussman This past May, a delegation organized by Kulanu, an organization that supports returning, emerging, and isolated Jewish communities around the world, journeyed to Madagascar. It was the culmination of a long process that brought Malagasys into the Jewish faith through conversion. After ascertaining that all the men in Madagascar who wanted to […]
Continue Readingby Ronna Benjamin A little over a year ago, just after a “clean” mammogram, my primary care physician found a lump in my breast during a routine physical, and insisted on the ultrasound that saved my life. Countless women who have been through this sort of thing know what happened next: the biopsy, the agony […]
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