Cementing Foundations
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by
Yakov Ham
About this booklet
The organisation's own history, and the closest thing to an origin story it has published. Beit Shemesh was founded in 1992, when the first 300 families moved out from Yerushalayim, and its continuity depended on a mikvah taharah. Harav Avrahom Yehoshua Waldman took on the task with the backing of Harav Moshe Aryeh Freund zt”l, who stayed personally involved throughout the building and came to both the laying of the cornerstone and the opening.
A second Beit Shemesh mikvah, Zechuyos Taharah, followed with five wells, and serves the city still. Those two buildings became the seed of the international project, founded in 2007.
The booklet then numbers the mikvaos that followed across Europe and beyond, and reports the pattern it says has held in every community: a four-fold rise in the number of families keeping the mitzvah once a mikvah exists locally.