Tag #120987 - Interview #102368 (Solomon Meir)

Only the over-religious people used the mikveh, they went and dove there. Brides had to go to the mikveh before getting married as well, the rabbi wouldn’t perform the wedding ceremony if they didn’t have a receipt from the bathhouse proving that they went to the mikveh. This was the custom, the bride had to go to the mikveh with the wife of the best man – with an interfiret, as they say. My mother too went to the mikveh when she was “the wife of the best man” – that was after the war. A cousin of mine, Manase Katz, got married, and my mother went to the mikveh with the bride, the wife-to-be, and I think she also went there on another occasion, I forget who the bride was. It wasn’t customary for Jewish married women to go to the mikveh around these parts. Perhaps this custom existed in other places. Let me tell you that the Jews living in Transylvania were much more religious than those from Moldavia.