When Hurricane Ian hit Fort Myers three years ago, Rabbi Yitzchok Minkowicz hesitated before stepping into one of his community’s most sacred spaces.
“I took a few days, I wasn't ready to go in,” he said. “When I went in, I saw what unfortunately I didn’t want to see — the place was destroyed, decimated. It was heartbreaking on many, many levels. For a while, we just didn’t know what to do.”
The storm had devastated the community’s mikvah, a women's-only ritual bath that Minkowicz calls one of the holiest institutions a community can have.
“The mikvah is used multiple times throughout, hopefully throughout one's life,” said his wife, Shani Minkowicz. “It's typically used to purify them from being impure for relations with their husband. We go to the mikvah, we dip in it, and we become spiritually renewed for that relationship. Every so often, you become impure, and then we tend to dip again, and it kind of renews that relationship, that not only we can have with our spouse, but with God as well.”
Inside the small yellow building, visitors first pass sinks and showers meant for physical cleansing before spiritual immersion in the mikvah itself. The ground-level mikvah is fed by a unique filtration system that collects rainwater — a biblical tradition dating back thousands of years.
On Sunday, Nov. 9, after three years of rebuilding with support from communities stretching from New York to Florida, members of the Southwest Florida Jewish community celebrated the Mikvah Bashka's reopening with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Different generations gathered for the milestone, sharing smiles and sushi.
“On one hand, we have like a sigh of relief — thank God, it’s over,” Rabbi Minkowicz said. “But it’s only the new beginning. We’re now going to continue to grow and bring what the community needs.”
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