Germany: €900,000 in state and federal grants to restore the 12th century mikveh in Worms

German state and federal governments have allocated €900,000 toward the restoration of the medieval mikveh in the synagogue complex in Worms.

During a visit to the synagogue this week, Rhineland-Palatinate state’s Interior Minister Michael Ebling officially presented a €360,000 grant for the project to the Worms Mayor. This adds to a federal government allocation of around €550,000 from a special monument protection program.

The mikveh dates from 1185/86, Twenty steps lead down to a platform, which incorporates a structure with two windows separated by a sandstone column. A spiral staircase from there leading further down to the water.  It is adjacent to the Worms synagogue, which also dated from the 12th century: the synagogue was destroyed in WW2 and totally rebuilt from rubble after the war.

Worms, along with the nearby cities of Mainz and Speyer, known by the acronym ShUM, combined to form a major Jewish center in the middle ages. Surviving today are archaeological vestiges, as well as Jewish cemeteries and matzevot, mikvaot, and reconstructions of medieval structures dating back 1000 years.

Last year, UNESCO added the ShUM cities to its roster of World Heritage. (ShUM is an acronym of the first letters of the medieval Hebrew names of the three cities: Shin (Sh) = Shpira = Speyer; Vav (represented as U) = Warmaisa = Worms; and Mem (M) = Magenza = Mainz.)

“We are very proud to have the first Jewish Unesco World Heritage Site in the Federal Republic of Germany here in Rhineland-Palatinate,” Michale Ebling, who is responsible for cultural heritage in Rhineland-Palatinate, said in a news release announcing the new grant.

In Worms’ synagogue district you can still experience the entire infrastructure that was required for a Jewish community in the Middle Ages. The preservation of this unique complex is particularly important to us. The funding from the state and federal government is primarily intended to finance repair work on the mikveh in order to make it accessible to the public again as soon as possible. 

The  announcement said repairs are scheduled to take place between 2023 and 2025, with a total cost estimated at around €1.5 million.

The mikveh has been closed to the public for years because of its structural problems, and discussions about its renovation have been going on for some years.

In 2015, the following problems were described:

• Damages: mois­ture pen­et­ra­tion, cracks, de­form­a­tion
  • by in­gress of sur­face water
  • by form­a­tion of con­dens­ate
• Stat­ic dam­ages
  • by earth pres­sure, es­pe­cially west­ern part (stairs)
• The ma­sonry is in an un­stable con­di­tion. The dis­in­teg­ra­tion of the joint sys­tem and struc­tur­al prob­lems im­pair the sta­bil­ity of the con­struc­tion.

Read the announcement of the grants on the R-P web site

Read about the plans for the restoration of the mikveh

Read a detailed description of the mikveh