Tag #152540 - Interview #101417 (Sarah Kaplan)

I became a wife. We lived in a room in my parents’ home. My mother watched that I strictly followed all requirements of a Jewish woman in regards to private life. During menstruation a husband wasn’t allowed to touch his wife. After menstruation a woman had to go to the mikveh. My mother made sure that I went to the mikveh. I was afraid to catch a cold there because the water in the mikveh was very cold. But my mother said that it was God’s direction for a woman to go to the mikveh and that meant that I wasn’t going to catch a cold. And I didn’t. When the mikveh at the synagogue was closed in the late 1930s my mother didn’t allow me to share a bed with my husband. Later religious Jews found huge tubs that belonged to a butcher and one of these tubs served as a mikveh to the women from Berdichev. Men didn’t go to the mikveh, they washed themselves at home.