After Centuries of Jewish Life, Pensacola Gets Its First Mikvah
by Leibel Kahan – Lubavitch.com
Jews have lived in Pensacola a while — they built Florida’s first synagogue here in 1876. But in all that time, the city never had a mikvah. The closest was a three-hour round trip to Destin, or even further to Mobile, Alabama. Or, as longtime resident Bruce Felder put it, “the cold water of the Gulf of Mexico, which is not particularly conducive in the wintertime.”
That changed on Sunday, when Rabbi Mendel and Nechama Danow opened Mikvah Gittel Raizel before a crowd of 120.
The Danows, who moved to Pensacola in 2018, said the mikvah was on their radar from day one. “A three-hour round trip is not very sustainable,” Rabbi Danow said. Nearly four years ago, they purchased a larger property two blocks from their Chabad house, with a plan to construct a single women’s mikvah. The project soon expanded into an 820-square-foot structure housing three mikvahs — for women, men, and vessels — clad in Jerusalem stone imported from Israel. Inside, marble floors and rose-gold accents lead from a lobby anchored by a Michoel Muchnik painting of a Jerusalem hillside into spa-grade preparation rooms with freestanding soaking tubs and glass-enclosed showers. The mikvah room itself is tiled in deep blue mosaic beneath a crystal chandelier, with another Muchnik painting — a scene of Shabbos candles and pomegranate trees — set into the far wall.
The construction cost over $600,000, funded by more than 300 donors. Major supporters include the Gellman family, who dedicated the mikvah in memory of Mrs. Gellman’s grandmother, Shaul Zislin, who dedicated the men’s mikvah in honor of his parents, and Mikvah USA. Keren HaChomesh, a fund started by the Lubavitcher Rebbe which gives to causes related to Jewish women and girls, provided a key grant for the project.
Ephraim and Ya’arah Feld moved to Pensacola 18 months ago from Kansas, where they had no local Jewish infrastructure at all. For Ephraim, the mikvah changes how the city feels. “It makes it feel like more of a Jewish community,” he said. For Ya’arah, it makes it official. “You don’t have to go anywhere,” she said. “This is the Jewish community. You have a Jewish support system here.” Describing the mikvah itself, Ya’arah said, “We saw pictures before and it looked beautiful, but in person — wow, it was breathtaking.”
Donor Bruce Felder, a retired endodontist who has lived in Pensacola since 1981, was among the ribbon-cutters. “I knew what a mikvah was, but I’d never seen one,” he said. “This is a huge thing for us.”
Rabbi Danow said demand grew alongside the building itself. “When we started the project a few years ago, many people weren’t even aware what a mikvah is,” he said. “But in the past few months, they were literally waiting for the mikvah to open.” At the event, one woman told him she had stopped going to mikvah entirely when she moved to Pensacola because there simply wasn’t one. Now — she plans to start again.
