PORTSMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE—A Jewish ritual bath, or mikveh, has been unearthed at Strawbery Banke, an outdoor history museum that preserves a neighborhood inhabited from the 1600s through the 1950s. The mikveh is thought to have been built sometime between 1912 and 1923, when the nineteenth-century house was occupied by representatives of the Hebrew Ladies Society. Ronald Pecunies, who grew up in the house in the 1940s and ‘50s, told the museum staff about the bath, which had been lined with white tiles. “His family did not use it for ritual immersion, but he remembered it being there. So, the only mention of a mikveh was in oral history,” museum archaeologist Alix Martin told Sea Coast Online. The mikveh will probably be backfilled for its protection.
