Rabbi Yossi Ben Shimon - Mexico - Part 2

00:21 Speaker 1 Yossi Ben Shimon, Chabad House of Isla Mujeres[?]. Shalom aleichem, Yossi. Our joy in the month of Adar is mixed, of course, with concern for the shluchim of the Rebbe shlita, Melech HaMoshiach, who are in Ukraine. The situation there is, at least by the laws of nature, very threatening. We feel for those shluchim and their families, all the Jews connected to them, and all Jews in general. It’s not a simple situation. Against that backdrop, Yossi, we’d like to hear about your shlichus in Mexico, which strengthens the shlichus of all the shluchim around the world. Last time, we spoke a little about the preparations for building the mikvah. Please continue the story of the mikvah today. It’s an extraordinary, fascinating story. What happened there? Let’s say l’chaim.

01:20 Speaker 2 Well, hello and blessings. L’chaim, l’chaim.

01:25 Speaker 1 L’chaim and blessings. Yechi Adoneinu Moreinu—

01:29 Speaker 2 May you be revealed immediately, literally. Yechi Adoneinu Moreinu v’Rabbeinu Melech HaMoshiach l’olam va’ed.

01:34 Speaker 1 L’chaim and blessings to all the Jews in the world. We’re with you, Yossi. Go ahead.

01:40 Speaker 2 Following on from last time, when we spoke about the preparations to purchase the property for the mikvah—this whole subject is fascinating. Even as I bring it up myself, I remember all kinds of very interesting and important details. So in this part, I’d like to talk about things we can really learn from: what we went through, how we got where we did, and where we got to. Once we had purchased the property and had it in our hands, we said—

02:18 Speaker 1 What do you mean by “property”? Everyone keeps talking about the property. What exactly was it? Tell us, explain. “Property” is a very broad word.

02:26 Speaker 2 In this case, for the mikvah, the property was a 140-square-meter plot of land. Just a piece of land with trees, flowers, grass and stones on it. That was the property we’re talking about.

02:44 Speaker 1 Okay.

02:45 Speaker 2 So we took possession of the property. Ownership was transferred into the Chabad House’s name, and we looked at it and said, “All right, let’s go. We need to start building. We’ve got everything in place; we just need to start.” Money is money, but let’s put that aside. We needed to start building. But how do we move forward? Where are the plans? Where are the preparations? The plans we’d had before, to build something of a certain size, didn’t fit the shape or size of this plot at all. My father, may he live and be well, also has an organization that helps and supports mikvaos in Israel. I called him and said, “Dad, I need help. We want to start building a mikvah. Help me—tell me how to proceed. What do we do? We need to start making plans. What’s the first step, the second step, the third step?” My father said, “Gladly.” He put us in touch with Rabbi Mordechai Kilav, who works with him on mikvaos. I had quite a few conversations with Rabbi Mordechai, and he began helping me plan the mikvah in practical, physical terms: according to the plot and its size, our needs, what we wanted, and what we had already spent months planning to have in the mikvah—how many rooms, roughly how big each room should be—and to adapt all of that to the plot we now had. Rabbi Mordechai did draw up plans for us. To start with, they were plans for how to divide up the space. With those plans, we said, “Wow, great! Now we can move forward, really get going.” We went to construction companies. I remember approaching nearly five or six companies

04:39 Speaker 2 and asking them for quotes to build on the plot. At that point, I didn’t really understand what building a mikvah involved, beyond showing them plans. There are the plans for the building, the plans for what they call in Spanish the obra negra—the structural shell—and all the plans for the interior. There are the detailed plans for the mikvah itself: what concrete pours to make, how many, how thick, how wide, how deep. I still didn’t understand any of that, or even grasp what it all meant. Eventually, after looking into companies, getting quotes and receiving recommendations from people, we chose a construction company and started working with them. We said, “Look, this is our plot, this is the mikvah, and this is the size we want.” Then we asked whether they could also do the interior design for us. So we had a long meeting—

05:38 Speaker 3 You asked for interior design?

05:40 Speaker 2 Interior design. We asked them to give us a proposal for that too. Before construction began on the site, we met with their interior designer and architect and showed them lots of mikvaos from around the world. We showed them what mikvaos look like, what a mikvah is. Before long, they sent us ten images of the interior design they proposed. It was extremely impressive, but it didn’t look like a mikvah should. The walls were yellow-orange, almost like fire. It had a warm, spa-like feel. It was very polished, done to a very high standard. But it wasn’t a mikvah. It just wasn’t a mikvah. We continued working with Rabbi Mordechai and moving forward, and we needed to get the plans for actually building the mikvah. That led us to look for another rabbi who could help us build it—someone more available when we needed him. Between Israel, Mexico and the United States, the time differences were really confusing our schedules. We found Rabbi Levin, who is from Be’er Sheva, and got in touch with him. We explained where things stood: construction had already begun, and we had an interior-design proposal, but it still wasn’t what we were looking for. He immediately came to our aid. He began drawing up the actual construction plans for the mikvah and its pits. I received plans to pass on to the people building on site, but I didn’t know how to read plans. I didn’t really understand all the drawings—how things were supposed to be, what

07:52 Speaker 2 needed to be done. I wasn’t even sure the Mexicans on site understood what was written there, but what could I do? Those were the plans. “Here you go, please start building.” So they started building, and I sent photos and updates. They told me, “Listen, this doesn’t look right. This doesn’t look right.” So I had to take photos, and you could see them digging. From where I stood, it already looked like a very deep pit. I thought, “Wow, that looks very deep.” But we were already starting to pour concrete, and I didn’t understand where the rabbi came into it—when was he coming? I asked him what was happening, and he said, “Tell them to do this; tell them to do that.” So I was passing on instructions—

08:28 Speaker 3 Yossi, where was this rabbi? Where in the world was he?

08:31 Speaker 2 He was in Israel.

08:33 Speaker 3 So he was in Israel, giving you instructions in Mexico on how to build the mikvah pit.

08:38 Speaker 2 He knows English, but not Spanish, and I know Spanish. He knows Hebrew, but I’m not a contractor or an architect, and I hadn’t studied the laws of mikvaos. I’d never accompanied the building of a mikvah, either, so I couldn’t really understand how the preparations for the mikvah and the concrete pour were supposed to be done or what they should look like. I didn’t know how to work out the right height. Even when you start excavating a building site, someone who doesn’t work in construction needs to understand where the construction’s zero level is.

09:14 Speaker 3 Did you have a site supervisor? A project manager? Anything?

09:18 Speaker 2 We had a supervisor, a Jew who lives in Cancun, but he didn’t understand construction either—certainly not mikveh construction. He and the builder tried to read the plans together, and apparently either they didn’t know how to read plans, or our plans from Israel are a little different from plans in Mexico. Maybe all of those answers are right. So they just kept going, and I think they’d reached the end and were ready to pour the concrete. Suddenly they were told, “Wait, wait. You’re nowhere near ready to pour. Let’s see where the zero point is. Measure this for me; do that.”

09:58 Speaker 3 Yossi, Yossi, explain to us what the zero point is. What are we talking about? What do we have so far?

10:03 Speaker 2 We need to reach a point where the finished floor level of the building—meaning where a person will walk when the mikveh is built and ready—is the zero point. From there, from that level, the bor will extend three and a half, 3.4 meters down.

10:29 Speaker 3 Wow.

10:30 Speaker 2 Getting to that point wasn’t simple. And it wasn’t really clear to them why anyone would need a bor three and a half meters deep. That’s almost the height of—I don’t know—a story and a half, maybe even more. Try explaining that to the Mexicans: “Okay, you want a pool? You don’t make a pool three and a half meters deep. A pool is 1.1 meters, 1.3 meters, 1.4 meters, 1.5 meters. Beyond that it starts getting dangerous.” And then there was the question of understanding the rest: “Okay, wait, you want another section of the bor in the middle. Fine. But you want every concrete pour to be thirty centimeters thick? Thirty centimeters? Who pours concrete thirty centimeters thick?”

11:08 Speaker 3 You mean thirty centimeters of concrete thickness, right?

11:11 Speaker 2 Concrete thickness, yes, thirty centimeters of solid concrete. That too was hard for them to understand—who does that, and how? Meanwhile, Rabbi Levin—

11:22 Speaker 3 Who is Rabbi Levin? What was Rabbi Levin’s role?

11:25 Speaker 2 Rabbi Levin is the rabbi who supervised—who prepared the construction plans for the immersion pools.

11:34 Speaker 3 So he’s a rabbi responsible for building the bor?

11:37 Speaker 2 He’s an expert in the laws of mikvaos, and he oversees mikvaos in Israel and around the world.

11:44 Speaker 3 So why didn’t he come to you in Mexico?

11:47 Speaker 2 He lives in Israel. The plan was for him to come when it was time to pour the concrete. He did come for the pour itself, to see what was happening. But he couldn’t come every two or three weeks from Israel to check the progress on site. So we sent him photos. At the same time, as I mentioned in the previous episode, we had answers from the Rebbe saying that the mikveh needed to be beautiful in both senses of the word. Beautiful—

12:22 Speaker 3 It needed to be what?

12:24 Speaker 2 The mikveh needed to be beautiful in both senses: beautiful to look at—

12:28 Speaker 3 A more elevated mikveh.

12:29 Speaker 2 And beautiful from a halachic standpoint. Yes, halachically as well. So, on the halachic side that we’re talking about now, there’s the Chabad approach, which of course has a bor beneath a bor, and there’s the—

12:42 Speaker 3 A bor beneath a bor, or a bor above a bor?

12:45 Speaker 2 A bor above a bor. And there are two other approaches, with boros alongside the immersion pool, for zeriya and hashaka. There’s also an approach in which one of those side boros is divided so that it, too, has a bor beneath a bor. We saw the Rebbe’s letters on the subject and said, “Okay, the Rebbe wants us to make the mikveh beautiful in both senses. We need to include all the opinions, all the approaches.” And since none of the approaches contradicts another, we could include them all. So we brought Rabbi David Dorfli[?] into the construction process. He’s a rabbi with the Syrian community in Mexico City, the largest and strongest community in Mexico, and he supervises mikveh construction in Mexico. We brought him in, and he did come from time to time to see what was happening and check that everything was in order. He came both on behalf of the rabbinate in Mexico City and at our request: we wanted him to see things with his own eyes, since Rabbi Levin couldn’t come regularly. He was close enough to Mexico City that he could get here on a two-hour flight. Meanwhile, we spoke with Rabbi Schwartz from the Mikvah Fund in Brooklyn, New York. They wanted to support the construction of our mikveh in Israel, and what they asked, of course, was that the mikveh also meet their standards. That suited us, because we wanted it to meet every approach. So they, too, sent representatives and rabbis from their fund to check that the mikveh was being built in accordance with all the stringent requirements of halacha. In effect, we had three groups of rabbis overseeing the construction of

14:50 Speaker 2 the mikveh, to make it a mehudar mikveh, mehadrin min hamehadrin. So we were discussing the construction plans, and at the same time, as we continued building the mikveh, we needed an interior design. The mikveh was already under construction. They were starting the foundations, starting to put up the structure—

15:16 Speaker 3 When we say interior design, we mean how beautiful the inside of the mikveh building would be. We wanted it to be mehudar not only halachically, but also beautiful—a beautiful building—

15:28 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

15:29 Speaker 3 One that appeals to the heart and the eye, and feels pleasant to enter, to sit in, to spend time in, and so on. Right? That’s what we’re talking about.

15:36 Speaker 2 Yes. We understood that the Rebbe wanted us to make the mikveh beautiful in its appearance too. We understood that even if it wouldn’t be used nonstop, the way a mikveh in a Chabad neighborhood in Israel might be, it would still have a very, very great impact on the world simply because of its beauty. And we really did manage to achieve that. How? We started, as I said, with a non-Jewish woman who made a design for us, but we didn’t connect with it at all. Of course, my wife was more involved than I was in everything to do with the interior design. She took charge of that part and pushed it forward with all her strength. Then we decided to turn to a Jewish designer. We looked for designers, and one offered to design the mikveh as a donation, to make it the most beautiful mikveh in the world. We were so happy. We had several conversations with her, but we saw that things weren’t moving. We had one conversation, then another, and kept asking, “Okay, when will this move forward? When will we see progress? When will we start getting pictures and seeing plans?” Another week went by, and another, and another. Then we concluded that if you don’t pay, you don’t see results. You can’t make demands, and you certainly can’t complain. So we started looking for an interior designer we could pay. We said, “All right, let’s set a limit. Let’s look for someone who’ll do it for up to five thousand shekels, ten thousand, twenty thousand—something like that.” We started looking within our limits. We said we couldn’t—

17:37 Speaker 4 What do you mean by “we started”? Were you a group of people?

17:40 Speaker 2 It was my wife and me, the other couple from the Dayan family who were here, and Shmuel, who was our right hand and helped us with everything concerning the mikveh so we could move forward. We realized we couldn’t tell a person what we wanted to pay them and, in return, expect to get exactly what we chose.

18:13 Speaker 4 Right.

18:13 Speaker 2 When we approach someone, we need to tell them what we want. If they give us a quote, we can’t just say, “Listen, this is our budget. Make us the most beautiful thing in the world,” and then list all our requirements, and so on. Then we realized that the world of interior designers is a very, very special world. It’s a very sensitive world, with a lot of feeling and a lot of heart. These are people who put their hearts into their work. It’s not just something that comes out of the mind, and then they start writing and drawing from right to left, and that’s it. The heart and the feeling go into it, so that a person can bring their own creations to life together with those of the client sitting across from them. So we got the process rolling, but we saw that we weren’t reaching a decision. We asked Shmuel—Shmuel Harel—to help us focus and choose the best interior designer, the one who would be most suitable for us. Shmuel did his research, and after two weeks he gave us an Excel file with four names. For each one, it listed the criteria, what was good and what was difficult. I’ll give you an example of the categories we looked at to help us choose: Did the designer’s quote include complete plans for plumbing, electrical work, lighting, furniture, carpentry, wall elevations, ceramics and tiles? Did her price also cover her travel to the site, the days she would work there, and any collaboration we might ask her to do with engineers or architects on site? Did she know English and Spanish? What were the payment terms—how many installments would we need to make? Did it include other things that were

20:20 Speaker 2 part of the planning—interior design, exterior design, the courtyard and things like that? We received the whole list, including the quotes, and that gave us a way to choose the person best suited to our requirements. The result was an interior designer named Michal Sela. She told us that she had been to 770 not long before we contacted her. We approached her around the holidays, and shortly before that she had been at 770. She had come out of one of the stores, or was leaving 770—I don’t remember exactly where—and she saw a sicha of the Rebbe in which the Rebbe spoke about the importance of a mikveh being of a very high standard, at least as beautiful as your own home. She was very moved by what the Rebbe said about the mikveh, and decided she wanted to start working on mikvehs, to help mikvehs. So at that time Shmuel sent her an email asking for a quote for the mikveh in Isla Mujeres, and somehow we connected and chose her to do the interior design. Of course, we paid the full price for the interior design. We felt that since we were paying a lot of money—an enormous amount—we could also ask for what we were entitled to under the quote. At least we could ask for it, insist on it, without being embarrassed. We’re paying; we’re entitled to it. We want to move forward, happily. She prepared plans for us and gave us a booklet of more than fifty pages of plans for everything in the mikveh, including elevations and carpentry. Everything had its own special, custom design. Even the sofas and chairs they brought were in keeping with the interior

22:25 Speaker 2 design we had chosen. On this particular point, I’ll add something else. When we went to the designer, she asked us, “Tell me, what’s your budget? Okay, I’m starting to design—what’s your budget?” We told her, “We don’t have a budget. We’re building the most beautiful mikveh in the world.” She said, “Wow, wonderful—no budget! What could be better for an interior designer than to be told there’s no budget? No budget? Go for it!” She chose the best of everything, the best materials, the highest-quality and most expensive things, so that the mikveh would truly be the most beautiful in the world. And that’s how it was. We received amazing plans for a mikveh—the most beautiful mikveh in the world—and we kept moving forward. We saw the mikveh going up and up, and the prices going up and up, with no end in sight. Suddenly every tile cost five hundred dollars, every little design feature cost a hundred and fifty dollars, a little strip of LED lighting and a large light fixture cost ten thousand dollars, and then there were all the surrounding details. Everything cost more. Our walls are very special walls, all the bathroom fixtures are of the highest possible standard, and all of it was so the mikveh would be the most beautiful in the world. The Rebbe wants a mehudar mikveh—a mehudar mikveh in both senses of the word: beautiful, and built according to all halachic opinions and methods. And that’s how it was. Boruch Hashem, the mikveh progressed, it took shape, and we built a mikveh that is perhaps almost the most beautiful in the world, or at least among the most beautiful.

24:03 Speaker 5 Did she come to see the mikveh?

24:05 Speaker 2 She did, yes. She came to us twice, twice. She was in Isla Mujeres twice, yes.

24:15 Speaker 5 And was she pleased with what you described?

24:19 Speaker 2 Pleased? The result was amazing. You can see photos on Google, Instagram, Facebook and all the sites. There was a dedication ceremony for the mikveh, and photos were published. People—

24:34 Speaker 5 I didn’t understand. If you type “Isla Mujeres mikveh” into Google, you can see your mikveh?

24:41 Speaker 2 Yes.

24:42 Speaker 5 Ah, okay. So, in short—

24:46 Speaker 2 There are two things I wanted—

24:47 Speaker 5 When was this mikveh completed?

24:50 Speaker 2 Two things I wanted to add before we get to its completion. First, during our first fundraising campaign, the Rebbe wrote to us that, when it comes to raising funds, quality is more important than quantity. So we understood that, more than having one person come and give all the money for the construction, it was important for as many people as possible to be partners in building it. It’s a mitzvah for generations, something that belongs to everyone and matters to everyone, and we really wanted to reach everyone. So we decided that every person who donated money to the mikveh, from one dollar or one shekel upward, would have their name recorded. We would remember them, and their name would be displayed in the mikveh. Boruch Hashem, today there are more than a thousand names on the mikveh’s entrance door. Everyone who donated any amount to the mikveh is there—there are a thousand names written there, each name, of course, sized according to the contribution. But the names are displayed on the wall, and whoever had the merit of taking part in the construction is a partner forever, and their name is there. That’s the first thing. Second, I want to return to the halachic side of the construction. As I mentioned, the workers on site didn’t really understand how to read the plans or carry them out. Several times they just built and built and built, and then they were told, “Listen, this isn’t right. You’re not... this isn’t even the right approach. Take it all apart and start building again. Take it all apart.”

26:19 Speaker 5 Wait, were they building with concrete or with wood?

26:22 Speaker 2 At first, they built with blocks. They said, “Well, it’s construction—let’s use blocks.” Blocks. But we wanted to pour concrete there. Before that pour, under Saltner’s [?] requirements, they make a concrete pour all the way around. In other words, before pouring the concrete for the mikveh itself, they pour concrete around it to protect the whole mikveh from earthquakes and other possible problems. They build an additional frame around the mikveh before building the mikveh itself.

26:58 Speaker 5 Wow.

26:58 Speaker 2 They started building with blocks. He said, “Not blocks. Who needs blocks? We need a solid concrete pour here, three meters down—a substantial concrete structure.” So they took it apart and made the first pour. Then they said, “Okay, now that we have the first pour, let’s do the inner pour. The inner pour has halachic requirements: it has to be poured as a single unit. The entire pour has to be done together.” That means the floor and the walls. To pour the floor and walls as one unit, you need all the—how do you say it in Hebrew—all the wood inside

27:32 Speaker 5 The whole frame, the whole wooden frame.

27:34 Speaker 2 Yes, there’s a technical name for it, I don’t remember it, but the whole framework basically has to be suspended in the air. If you want a floor, the floor has to be poured together with the wall. That means the framework has to be suspended in the air.

27:50 Speaker 5 Yes.

27:50 Speaker 2 To get the framework suspended in the air, you have to understand, see, and learn how to keep it there without letting it move to one side or touch one of the walls. And you can’t put rebar across between the walls to hold them at the right distance, because it has to be one continuous concrete pour. There can’t be rebar sticking out on the right or the left. So it’s a very long and complicated process. As someone doing it for the first time, I really couldn’t grasp how it was supposed to work or what it was supposed to look like, especially with such a large, substantial pour. It took several days and several attempts before they even managed to build what they thought was needed. And then, in the end, everything looked ready. Everything looked ready; the water and concrete were there. The rabbis came for the first pour. When they arrived, they said, “Listen, the framework isn’t right. The framework isn’t right. You can’t pour a mikveh like this.” They had to spend several days taking the whole framework apart. The rabbis left, and the framework was rebuilt with guidance from— they brought in a supervisor, a Jewish man from Brooklyn who is himself a mikveh contractor, along with one of his workers. They came from Brooklyn especially to help build the framework for the mikveh pour. Only after that did the rabbis come again. About two and a half or three weeks later, they came back to inspect the framework and actually do the pour. So that was something I’d really suggest to anyone building a mikveh: learn about the process yourself, too, as the person on site. After all, the mikveh remains ours, it’s our responsibility, and the payments go through our hands.

29:41 Speaker 2 You need to understand what it’s supposed to look like and how it’s actually being built. If there isn’t a supervisor specifically overseeing the mikveh from a halachic standpoint who comes every few days to check that everything is being done as it should be, then you need to do that. So l’chaim, Chaim, with Hashem’s help.

29:58 Speaker 6 L’chaim. Wishing you success. Do people use it? Do they immerse in your mikveh?

30:03 Speaker 2 Of course. People immerse there, and baruch Hashem, demand is much higher than we expected. Because the mikveh is so beautiful, many people know about it. People coming to the area know there’s a mikveh in Isla Mujeres[?], one of the most beautiful mikvaos in the world. Quite often, couples come from Miami and even New York and say, “Okay, let’s make a weekend of it. Where should we spend the weekend? This works out well—we’ll spend the weekend in Isla.” That happens a great deal, baruch Hashem. We’re also seeing the substantial change this mikveh has brought about in the wider world of mikvaos. We get many inquiries. I get many calls from people around the world who want advice, want to see pictures, and want to draw inspiration from the mikveh.

31:01 Speaker 6 Really, well done, Yossi.