Jewish museum Trondheim will in the following weeks present photographs and artifacts from the museum’s collection. We temporarily call this column “Artifact of the week”. When the schools open and the museum is back to normal, we will go back to our usual “Artifact of the month”.

This week we share a photograph of one of the museum’s two wooden bathtubs. They were made in 1933 when the building, which also holds the synagogue, opened a mikveh in the basement. A mikveh is a Jewish ritual bath. Traditionally the bath is used in preparation of shabbat, before a marriage is held or if you are converting to Judaism. You bade in the mikveh to achieve ritual purity, and these bathtubs were used to clean oneself before one entered the mikveh.

The bathtubs are no longer in use. Today they are part of the museum’s exhibition about the Jewish life in Trondheim.