mikvah

mik·vah

(mĭk′və, mēk-vä′)

n. pl. mik·voth or mik·vot (-vōt′, -vōs′) or mik·vahs

1. A ritual purification bath that is taken by observant Jews on certain occasions, as before marriage or after menstruation or childbirth, or when converting to Orthodox or Conservative Judaism.

2. A building, room, or fixture in which this bath takes place.

[Hebrew miqwâ, reservoir or miqwe, collection (of water), immersion pool, both from qāwâ, to collect; see qbw in Semitic roots.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

mikvah

(mikˈvɑ; ˈmikvə) or

mikveh

(Judaism) Judaism a pool used for ritual purification, esp by women after their monthly period

[from Hebrew]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

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Noun

mikvah - (Hebrew) a ritual purification and cleansing bath that Orthodox Jews take on certain occasions (as before Sabbath or after menstruation)

bath - you soak and wash your body in a bathtub; "he has a good bath every morning"

Judaism - the monotheistic religion of the Jews having its spiritual and ethical principles embodied chiefly in the Torah and in the Talmud

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He sees the drawings of plants as medicinal, arguing that Jews of that time often worked as doctors, and that the illustrations of communal pools are actually depicting a mikvah, the Jewish ritual bath.

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The process ended with a dip in the mikvah and a festive meal under the direction of Rabbi Dudu Dery, who accompanied and led the conversion process of the singer.

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Mirvis takes mincing steps, like refusing to let down her hair in the mikvah, a Jewish cleansing bath to demarcate her days of "impurity." In a humiliating ritual, women are made to insert a clean piece of cloth in their vagina to bring to the rabbi for inspection of potential menstrual stains before being deemed kosher, like ritually slaughtered meat.

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It opened the Gosforth synagogue in 1986, with the large plot containing a synagogue, a mikvah (ritual bath) and a function hall.

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So Pogrebin "sukkah-surfs" across Los Angeles, donates clothing as tashlich, sits behind a gendered partition in services, and reads the founding documents of the State of Israel to her accommodating children; she visits a mikvah ahead of the new year, and recreates the feminist seders of her mother's day.

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"Deception in the Pews" also features a diverse collection of cautionary stories depicting abuse across religions ranging from: a rabbi arrested for voyeurism after secretly recording female congregants while they were naked in the Mikvah; a pastor was caught breaking into a parishioner's home on Christmas Eve; a former Hindu Temple priest sentenced to over 20 years in prison on felony counts including bank fraud, tax fraud and obstruction.

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Over the years the temple has flourished, offering yoga classes, ecstatic dance and music, empowerment pujas, a moon lodge, ritual immersions in the sacred pool (Mikvah), and priestess gatherings.

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Observant Jews--most often married women--use a ritual bath, called a mikvah, for conversions and sometimes before the High Holy Days or Sabbath.

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Prosecutors said the Brooklyn-born Freundel, who headed the synagogue for 25 years, hid cameras in an area where women disrobed for the ritual Jewish bath, known as a mikvah.