When Hurricane Ian hit Fort Myers three years ago, Rabbi Yitzchok Minkowicz hesitated before stepping into one of his community’s most sacred spaces.

“I took a few days, I wasn't ready to go in,” he said. “When I went in, I saw what unfortunately I didn’t want to see — the place was destroyed, decimated. It was heartbreaking on many, many levels. For a while, we just didn’t know what to do.”

The storm had devastated the community’s mikvah, a women's-only ritual bath that Minkowicz calls one of the holiest institutions a community can have.

“The mikvah is used multiple times throughout, hopefully throughout one's life,” said his wife, Shani Minkowicz. “It's typically used to purify them from being impure for relations with their husband. We go to the mikvah, we dip in it, and we become s

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