By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
There are few better examples of living water than the Red Sea. In the Book of Exodus, God delivers the people of Israel through those very waters after four hundred years of Egyptian bondage.
Perhaps that’s why it seems so perfect to me that the Mikveh used for Jewish ritual bathing at a Salt Lake City synagogue includes a lovely stained glass window featuring a Red Sea sunrise.
Of course, as a Catholic, I’ve never bathed in the Mikveh at Congregation Kol Ami. I did learn about the window, however, when I visited the Utah studios of the artists who created it—Tom and Gayle Holdman.
I met the Holdmans last year when we sat together at a lunch honoring 150 years of service in Utah from the Holy Cross Sisters of Notre Dame, Indiana. Tom and Gayle unveiled a stained-glass window they created for that landmark anniversary.
We stayed in touch. A few months later, Tom and Gayle gave my wife Vicki and I a tour of their beautiful art studios and I learned their fascinating backstory.
Tom grew up in nearby Orem but had to contend with a serious stutter. He learned to communicate in other ways, including through art. Eventually, Tom developed an interest in stained glass.
After serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Tom traveled in Europe to see the world’s finest and oldest glass art, mostly in Catholic churches. He slept in his rental car between church visits.
Once back home, he supported himself by selling windows he made in a glass studio he built in his parents’ garage. Near the beginning of this remarkable career, Tom met Gayle, fell in love, and gave her an engagement ring.
After she accepted the ring, Tom said they had to start work on the stained-glass window he’d promised the jeweler as payment for it. (Gayle wrote a wonderful children’s book telling their story.)
Today, the couple own Holdman Studios at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, Utah. Their beautiful glass art beautifies some two hundred Latter-day Saint Temples as well as Protestant churches, Catholic churches, and the CommonSpirit Catholic hospitals.
Their windows also delight folks at the Orem City Library (Tom’s first big commission) and at Utah Valley University, where Tom attended college. Now the Holdmans are busy planning a spectacular stained-glass museum to be built in Utah County.
When I visited the studio, Tom told me they made a window for the Jewish synagogue in Salt Lake City. Over the years I have had many friends from Kol Ami, so I called and asked to see the window.
Kol Ami Executive Director Danny Burman led the tour, with a cameo appearance by Rabbi Samuel Spector. The kind gentlemen also gave me a brief lesson I like to call “Mikvehs 101.”
A mikveh is a basin of water used for the Jewish ritual of immersion, cleansing, and purification. Jews often use the Mikveh during times of change or transition.
Some of these times are the more routine moments of life (a traditional cleansing after menstruation or every Friday before Shabbat). Some are the big milestones of life (childbirth, a career change, a religious conversion).
Rabbi Spector has used it for both types of moments, including before his marriage and when he became a father. It was another such moment of transition in the rabbi’s life that inspired the stained glass window in the Kol Ami Mikveh.
Kol Ami wanted a beautiful work of art to accentuate the Mikveh ritual and experience. They asked local artists—the Holdmans—to design a window.
When the initial design was done, the artists presented it to Rabbi Spector for his approval. He liked it but asked the artists to include one additional image.
During his rabbinical studies in Israel, the rabbi also spent some time studying in Egypt. He had to take a long bus ride to get there, a daunting task even in the best of times.
Once day while the rabbi was in Egypt, the Egyptian revolution erupted. The rabbi had to leave and that day the bus ride back to Israel—in the middle of the turmoil—was even more difficult.
Near the end of that journey, as the bus reached the Red Sea, the sun was rising. It was a hopeful and encouraging image, and the rabbi took a photo of it.
During the planning for the Kol Ami Mikveh window, the rabbi showed that photo to the Holdman studio artists. They liked it too and incorporated the beautiful image into the next and final version of the glass artwork.
Today, when Utah’s Jews confront their own small or large transitions and moments of change during a ritual bath at Kol Ami, they too get to see a Red Sea sunrise. That works both artistically and theologically, because living water and new beginnings are at the very heart of the Mikveh experience.
Jews partaking in the Mikveh ritual must clean themselves thoroughly before entering the basin of water. It’s a symbolic form of washing away the old person. Kol Ami has spotless preparation rooms available for this purpose.
The steps and floor of the Kol Ami Mikveh floor have a natural look and feel—like the sand at a lake bottom or beach. The water that flows into the basin after appropriate filtration is fresh Utah snowmelt or rainwater.
The participants in the ritual immerse themselves completely into that living water. They emerge cleansed and purified, ready to face that which lies ahead for them
It’s a lovely ritual, and not unlike what Jesus did—at the start of his public ministry—when he was baptized in the Jordan River by his cousin John. (By the way, the rabbi told me that this Jesus moment was a Mikveh too!)
The Holdmans’ glass art window is placed above the water on the main Mikveh wall. On sunny days, beams of colored light stream down into the room. Some are blue, but some are bright yellow, evoking the Red Sea sunrise Rabbi Spector saw.
It took some six months to bring together the two hundred separate pieces of colored glass in the Holdmans’ glass artwork at Kol Ami. The Holdmans even let some congregation members create one of the pieces.
To complete the full artistic effect, the Holdmans also prepared some stained glass doorway mezuzahs for the Mikveh, each one embracing a scroll with scripture passages. The mezuzahs remind Jews they are in a holy place and should act accordingly when entering and leaving.
Local foundations and Kol Ami members underwrote the costs of the Mikveh project. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also donated money to help with the installation.
Rabbi Spector told me that the Hebrew word “mikveh,” besides referring to a collection or gathering of water, is sometimes also used as another way to express the notion of hope.
We need more basins of hope—more places reminding us to look for lovely sunrises—in our troubled, anxious, and divided world. It warms my heart when diverse hands, including Utah’s artists and people of faith, join forces to make that happen.
Perhaps the plaque from the June 2025 Kol Ami Mikveh dedication articulates what I am trying to say even better than me, “This mikveh was made possible by the generosity of Jews, Christians, and Muslims—an expression of shared faith in healing, renewal, and human dignity.”
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
