University of Warsaw
The Mikveh as a Women’s Ritual Space in an Age of Transition, 1870–1939
Anna Berezowska’s doctoral project explores how processes of modernization within Jewish societies from the mid-nineteenth century onward, together with the first wave of feminism, urban migration, emerging discourses on hygiene, and the development of modern Yiddish culture, transformed the social and gendered meanings of the mikveh. Focusing primarily on Central Europe between 1870 and 1933, she compares developments in Polish and German lands to examine how perceptions of women’s ritual spaces were shaped by interactions between Jewish minority culture and the surrounding dominant societies. Drawing on literary and architectural sources, she investigates how modernization reshaped mikveh spaces and influenced Jewish women’s religious and social experiences, situating the ritual within new gendered and social contexts.
Anna Berezowska is a PhD candidate at the Taube Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wrocław. She holds M.A. degrees in Art History (2016) and Archaeology (2019) from the University of Wrocław and completed studies at the Centre for Jewish Languages and Cultures in 2014. In 2020, as an Amos Oz Fellow, she graduated from the One-Year Program in Jewish Studies at Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden. During the 2023–2024 academic year, she was a fellow of the International Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme. She was also a scholarship holder of the Medem Library in Paris (2021) and a fellow of “Sandwich” doctoral Scholarship at Bar Ilan University.