Skerdėjų gatvė 6

Abstract

In 2019, the field evaluation conducted at Skerdėjų St. 6, Klaipėda, sought to determine whether any Jewish ritual bathhouse structures had survived inside the building. Five test pits (a total of 16.45 m2 ) were excavated inside the roughly 160 m2 building (Fig. 1) and revealed a 16th–20th-century cultural layer up to 2.2 m thick that contained finds and structures from the second half of the 18th – first half of the 20th century: foundation fragments, a stove pad (?), and a mikveh, a Jewish ritual pool. The foundations of former interior walls, a packed earth floor, and a stove (?) pad were unearthed at a depth of 0.3–1.1 m in the test pits. The structures were found at different depths in the test pits and had been built using different sized bricks. This shows that the building’s layout had been altered several times and that the plot had perhaps been developed earlier than the mid-19th century. The masonry structure (part of the foundation of an interior wall?) discovered in test pit 2 can be attributed to the plot’s first development (second half of the 18th century) or its earliest layout. The foundation and packed clay floor unearthed in test pit 1 date to the first half of the 19th century and the structures discovered in test pits 4 and 5 to the mid19th – first half of the 20th century. A Jewish mikveh pool was discovered in the NW part of the investigated building (Fig. 2). The mikveh was round with an interior diameter of roughly 1.55–1.6 m, a wall width of roughly 40–45 cm, and had been constructed from 27x13x7 cm red clay bricks bound with lime mortar. The interior had been lined with ceramic tiles.