Researcher Miriam Entin is scouring historical records to build the first comprehensive database of historical mikvehs in the city. Despite nearly 400 years of Jewish history in the city, researchers have discovered only three historical mikvehs, as dense urban development and historical neglect have left most buried, forgotten, or demolished.
When a backhoe struck an asphalt lot surrounded by a chain-link fence on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2003, it uncovered more than just dirt. Workers exposed a white tiled wall and a set of marble steps descending into a rectangular bath, featuring a Star of David made of blue hexagonal tiles at the center of the floor. Archival research later revealed that a Congregation Moshcisker Chevrah Gur Arye once operated at the site, identifying the pool as a mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath used for ritual immersions and purification.
That discovery remains a rare exception. Across nearly 400 years of Jewish history in the city, archaeologists have discovered only three historical mikvehs. Most have vanished beneath the city’s dense urban sprawl, swallowed by decades of redevelopment, buried under tenements, or demolished entirely. While Jewish archaeology in the city has traditionally focused on synagogues and cemeteries, Entin is working to change that.
Scouring Archives for Lost Mikvehs on the Lower East Side
Entin, 29, a PhD candidate in archaeology at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, is digging through historical Yiddish advertisements, fire insurance maps, and archival materials to track down the city’s lost ritual baths. Her ongoing research aims to compile the first comprehensive database of historical mikvehs in the city.
The search relies on cross-referencing multiple historical records. Fire insurance maps help identify the locations of synagogues alongside descriptions of basements or baths that hint at a potential mikveh. Entin then cross-references those maps with databases like the Center for Jewish History to verify whether a congregation maintained a bath. Historical Yiddish advertisements—such as a notice published in the Yiddish newspaper Der Morgen Zshurnal on September 6, 1915—provide specific addresses and name the certifying rabbis.
Uncovering these hidden structures offers a rare window into daily immigrant life. It comments on the social world, the experience of these immigrants,
Entin said in an interview.
Tenements, Streams, and the Stresses of Early Urban Life
The history of mikvehs in the city stretches back to 1654, when Jews arrived from Brazil in New York City, then known as New Amsterdam. Before dedicated facilities existed, earlier generations likely used natural streams for ritual immersions. Congregation Shearith Israel built the city’s first formal mikveh in 1759 on what is now South William Street, utilizing water from a natural stream.
By the early 20th century, the Lower East Side was a neighborhood covering less than one square mile, packing more than 500 congregations into the area. Pressed for space, multiple congregations often rented rooms inside the same tenement building. Mikvehs were squeezed into synagogue basements, private facilities, tenement cellars, and backyards. Some facilities operated quietly without ever appearing in business directories or official congregation lists, known only to immediate neighborhood residents.
Maintaining these crowded facilities was a constant struggle. A 1914 city report cited in research by Dr. Celia Bergoffen—an archaeologist and professor at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology who excavated an Allen Street mikveh in 2001—described the water in tenement basement mikvehs as thick and slimy… covered with the scum from the bodies of the bathers.
As tenements were demolished and Jewish residents began moving away from the neighborhood, the number of Lower East Side mikvehs steadily declined starting in the 1920s.
Urban Development Complicates Future Excavations
Finding what remains of these sites is far harder than conducting rural archaeology. Dense urban infrastructure blocks digs. You can’t just go and say, ‘Okay, I have these research questions and I want to find out the answers, so I’m just going to start digging on Fifth Avenue,’
Entin noted.
Mikvehs have been a longtime topic of study in Europe, but in the US, were mostly neglected until the last 20 years. Bergoffen explains that part of the reason is that many women who used mikvehs were shy to discuss the practice because it has to do with women’s sexuality and menstruation and women’s marital relations.
Entin hopes her research will open the way for future excavations, as archaeologists will be able to use her data to advocate for digs during development projects, unlocking the secrets hidden beneath old city buildings.
