A Mikvah in Mat-Su, Alaska

More than 350 residents of Alaska’s Mat-Su Valley contributed to the construction of a local mikvah. The first to be built in the state outside of Anchorage, the mikvah formally opened on June 30.

The Matanuska-Susitna Valley covers 23,000 square miles of small towns, homesteads, and long roads — roughly the size of West Virginia. It is the fastest-growing region in Alaska, with a population exceeding 120,000. An estimated 1,000 Jews live scattered across it. Before Rabbi Mendy and Chaya Greenberg arrived eleven years ago, there was no organized Jewish life in the valley at all. Jews who wanted to attend a Passover seder or High Holiday services drove to Anchorage, some 45 miles away, on roads that winter weather could make treacherous.

The Greenbergs, who run Chabad of Mat-Su, built a community from that starting point — Shabbat and holiday gatherings, a summer camp, adult education. But for all those years, anyone who needed a mikvah still had to make the drive to Anchorage. “It was time we built one where we were,” Rabbi Greenberg said.

In 2025, Rabbi Greenberg reached out to Keren HaChomesh, a fund started by the Rebbe for causes relating to Jewish women and girls. “It’s a true honor to receive money from the Rebbe’s fund,” he said. “We feel we were blessed from it.”

Local volunteers dug the foundation. Within a week and a half, the cement was poured — before the High Holidays. Construction on the building began in February.

In addition to the hundreds of both Jewish and non-Jewish contributors from the local community, people from around the world joined as well. Major supporters included George and Pamela Rohr, Rabbi Mendel and Nechama Lichtenstein, and Rabbi Dovid Derly, who made the first commitment to the project.

“There’s no better way to introduce this mitzvah than building it in front of our community for a year,” Rabbi Greenberg said. Locals had watched the construction unfold and came to appreciate it before it ever opened, with tours given along the way.

One year after that first shovel entered the ground, the mikvah was complete.

The grand opening on June 30th drew more than 100 people. A letter of the Lubavitcher Rebbe was read in front of the crowd, which had been written in 1974 to Israel Haber, a Jewish military chaplain stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base, when the first mikvah in Alaska was built there with the help of rabbis the Rebbe had dispatched for the job.

The mayors of the Mat-Su Borough, Palmer, and Wasilla — Edna DeVries, Jim Cooper, and Glenda Ledford — each spoke, addressing the mikvah’s importance to the community and noting the halachic principle that a mikvah’s construction precedes that of a synagogue or even the writing of a Torah scroll. Rabbi Greenberg’s parents — Rabbi Yosef and Esther Greenberg, the regional directors of Chabad in Alaska — also spoke at the event.

“No one would have thought that a mikvah would be built in Mat-Su,” Rabbi Greenberg said. “We see how, now more than ever, the Rebbe’s vision is alive.”