About the narrator:
Sara Kahn-Troster is a Jewish community leader in Portland, Maine, serving as the President of Temple Beth El and a public policy advocate at MaineHealth. Originally from New Jersey, she has been deeply involved in Jewish communal life and has worked on inclusivity and adaptation within Jewish traditions. Her experiences with the Mikvat Shalom project, which aimed to renovate and re-establish a community mikvah in Portland, highlight her commitment to preserving and modernizing Jewish ritual spaces. Kahn-Troster is married to Rabbi Professor David Freidenreich, and their home is a hub for Jewish learning and engagement.
In this excerpt from her interview with Shahzaib Awan at her her home in Portland on January 19, 2025, Kahn-Troster discusses the importance of mikvah in the Maine Jewish community.
Transcript:
“I think it’s an important resource that we have one, because there are people who wish to convert or use it for other rituals. I think we’re in an era where people—and this has been going on for twenty, thirty years at this point—are rethinking the place of mikvah in their lives, in terms of using it at important transition moments, liminal moments. I think that’s where you’re going to see more people looking to use it – to mark important health transitions or important stages in people’s lives. But also, there are the traditional uses. We have a lot of people in Maine who are choosing to be Jewish. It’s important that we have a resource here for them, that they can do that here and not have to travel beyond the state.”- Sara Kahn-Troster
Sara Kahn-Troster’s full oral history interview is available through Colby’s Special Collections & Archives.
About the interviewer:
Shahzaib Awan is an undergraduate student at Colby College, double majoring in Physics and Computer Science. As a Muslim student from Pakistan, Awan brings a unique perspective and a cross-cultural appreciation for religious traditions and rituals. His analytical approach and curiosity about faith-based practices shaped his engagement with Sara Kahn-Troster’s experiences and insights into Jewish communal life in Maine.
This class, Awan wrote, helped him understand “how tough it can be for religious communities to keep their traditions alive, especially in a world that’s constantly changing. The story of the Mikvat Shalom project, which struggled to get support and eventually closed down, reminded me of my own experiences witnessing the efforts to maintain Islamic traditions within the Pakistani community in the face of modernization.”
But, Awan said, “one of the things that surprised me the most [throughout this course] was how flexible Jewish traditions are. I used to think that ancient rituals like the mikvah were pretty fixed, but I learned that they can change and adapt to fit modern needs.”