Students from Colby College helped harvest ice from a lake for a new mikvah, or ritual bath, at a synagogue in Waterville.
WHY ARE WE HERE?
We explore how America defines itself one place at a time. When a synagogue in Maine needed water for a ritual Jewish bath, he drew it from a suitable natural spring, with the help of some friends.
Reporting from Waterville and Strong, Maine
Standing on a frozen pond in western Maine on a Sunday morning last month, wearing LL Bean boots and a hoodie, Rabbi Rachel Isaacs paused to dedicate the ice beneath her feet before ordering it for a higher purpose.
“Blessed are you, God, for bringing us to this moment!” the rabbi tied the belt. Austin Thorndike, a member of her congregation at Beth Israel Synagogue in Waterville, stood by her side. When the prayer was over, he fired up his chainsaw and bent down to plunge it into the hard surface of the lake, deftly making four quick cuts to free a smooth, white, perfect block of ice.
The ice was destined for a highly unusual end. As the blocks multiplied, a crew of Colby College student athletes sprung up, pulling them out of the lake, pushing them ashore and quickly loading them into waiting trucks. The frozen cargo would then be driven 40 miles to the synagogue, where students would carry it into the basement. There, they would wipe each block with a cloth, stack it in the church’s brand new mikvah, and let it melt.
The mikvah — a traditional Jewish bath used in rites of renewal and purification for thousands of years — would elevate this small synagogue in Waterville, a town of 16,000, to a destination for people from across Maine seeking a symbolic new beginning. But its creation, according to ancient Jewish law, was not as simple as turning on a faucet. To be kosher, a new mikvah must be started with “living water,” taken directly from nature.
Harvesting ice from a lake was not the easiest approach. (Rainwater harvesting is more common.) But the wooded, wintry design was a good fit for Maine, participants said. So is the involvement of Colby students, some of them Jewish and some of them not.
In a rural state where a small Jewish population often needs grit, ingenuity and strong relationships to achieve its goals, the small liberal arts college and the small Waterville synagogue have long been closely linked. Friday night dinners at Beth Israel, hosted by Colby Hillel, the Jewish organization on campus, reliably serve 30 to 40 students, a mix of practicing Jews, their non-Jewish friends and others drawn to the warm routine.
It was only natural, then, for Rabbi Isaacs to ask for help transporting ice from students at Colby, where she is an assistant professor of Jewish studies and director of the college’s Center for Jewish Life in Small Towns.
Andrew Postal, a sophomore from Andover, Mass., brought other rugby players onto the frozen lake, while Caitlin Kincaid, a senior from Colorado Springs, Colo., recruited 10 members of the Colby Woodsmen team, specializing in sawing wood and swinging chop.
“Upper body strength is something we have in abundance at Colby,” said Rabbi Isaacs.
In many synagogues, particularly Orthodox ones, the mikvah is reserved for strictly traditional uses, including conversion to Judaism and symbolic cleansing by women after menstruation. Waterville’s new mikveh will be one of a few dozen across the country, and the only one in Maine, that will instead be “open” — part of a 20-year movement by some of the more liberal congregations to make the tradition more inclusive, using it to to observe a more diverse range of milestones, such as a college graduation or a gender transition.
The students the rabbi had recruited were willing to participate, even if they didn’t know what a mikvah was before he explained it.
“Everyone was like, ‘Yeah! The synagogue needs ice!” said Will Whitman, 22, a senior rugby player who had quickly signed on to help. “Then we said, ‘Wait — why does the synagogue need ice?'”
Out on the lake, their boots reinforced with ice straps, the students and other volunteers took turns grabbing the heavy, freshly cut blocks with a pair of oversized wooden tongs and pulling them out of the water. “It’s like the claw game,” he said Alex Kimmel, 31, a member of a Jewish community in Augusta, as a square slipped from her hand and splashed back into the lake.
Others stood back and admired the scene—the small spring-fed pond surrounded by birch and pine. the fine mist rising from the melting snow. students lugged ice packs onto a plastic sled, which they dragged up a steep snow ridge to waiting trucks. More than one viewer was reminded of the opening scene of “Frozen,” the Disney movie set in frozen Arendelle.
To plan the operation, Rabbi Isaacs, 41, had relied on the expertise of Mr. Thorndike, 35, an arborist and native Mainer who had provided the ice from a pond on his family’s land. (“I’m from the Jersey Shore,” Rabbi Isaacs said. “I trust my congregation’s Maine.”)
Mr. Thorndike’s own conversion to Judaism, in 2020, helped advance the plan to build an in-house mikvah at Beth Israel. Immersion in living water is required to complete the conversion process, but the nearest mikvah, about 60 miles away in Bangor, was closed at the time due to the pandemic.
Eager to sign the deal, Mr. Thorndike had agreed to drown in a Maine lake – in October.
“To be kosher, it has to be three full immersions, and you can’t touch anything, so I was treading water,” he said. “It was like Navy SEAL training.”
Seeing him suffer, the rabbi decided to create a less painful option.
“His teeth were chattering so much he could barely say the blessing,” she recalled.
Conversions have taken place with increasing frequency since Rabbi Isaac arrived to lead Beth Israel. The congregation, founded in 1902, had dwindled to fewer than 20 families when he became rabbi in 2011. It has since grown to 70.
More than 20 percent of its current members are “Jews by choice” who were not raised in the religion – a development that Rabbi Isaacs sees as critical to the future of her synagogue, “and to the future of small-town Jewish life” throughout America.
The synagogue enlisted other Jewish congregations in Maine, which will also use the mikvah, to pay for its continued upkeep.
“You might expect to see it in Boston or New York, but to have it here in a small college town is extraordinary,” said Julie Childers, director of the Mayyim Hayyim mikvah in Newton, Massachusetts. “Sometimes it’s small towns where things like that can happen.”
Ms. Childers, who traveled to Maine to harvest the ice, oversees a national network of “open” mikv’ot (plural of mikvah), providing guidance on construction, training sessions and text for ceremonies, among other services .
Rabbi Isaacs – who said she considers herself “the rabbi of Waterville,” not just Beth Israel – will also welcome non-Jews into the mikvah, according to the synagogue’s diverse affiliations.
“It’s a place to deepen one’s relationship with spirituality, to start over,” he said. “There aren’t many places for this kind of renewal.”
With the Colby students keeping a fast pace, shedding layers of clothing as they worked, the ice was cut and ready for transport in less than an hour. Walking through the woods and villages of western Maine — Rabbi Isaac drove 10 of the 60 blocks alone in her truck — the ice arrived at the synagogue shortly after noon.
It melted quickly in the 60-degree room, dripped audibly into the deep basin, and slowly filled over the next few days. After some water had evaporated, Mr. Thordike had to deliver a few more blocks, to ensure that the mikvah contained the ton of living water required by Jewish law. But by mid-March, the mikvah was ready.
On a Sunday afternoon, two weeks after the ice was harvested, Colby student Lucia Greene, 18, became the first to complete her conversion to Judaism at the mikvah, descending its seven steps — representing the seven days of creation described in the Torah — and immerses himself in its filtered, heated waters.
The milestone felt surreal, he said — and also “too soon,” even after nearly two years of preparation.
“But I felt Jewish for a while,” she said. “And when you feel that way, it’s time to enter the mikvah.”
