You might not necessarily know her name, but this designer’s work is a staple in millions of homes around the world.
Olga Popyrina spent decades creating lighting fixtures and glassware for home furnishings giant IKEA, founded and headquartered in Sweden, and established her own company as a freelance designer in Sweden, Popyrina Design. She’s designed spaces for a high-end restaurant in Tokyo, hotels and private properties in Moscow, malls and homes in New York, private properties in London, a library and villas in Vancouver, a private property for LASVIT Moscow, an EU office in Gothenburg, and the Grenen Art Museum for Axel Lind.
Her connection to Gothenburg’s Jewish community, though, predates any of that.
Popyrina arrived in Sweden from Russia in the early 1990s, the daughter of Russian diplomats from the Soviet era, drawn to the country by her passion for design and architecture. She was soon drawn as well to Rabbi Alexander and Leah Namdar, who had just established Chabad-Lubavitch Sweden in the city, and enrolled her son, Ivan, in their fledgling preschool. She chose a Hebrew name around that time: Ora, Hebrew for “light.” It suited her.
She even approached the Namdars with an idea to create a custom lamp for the Chabad center. The lamp, bearing the verse “And G‑d said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” still stands there today.
Now, more than 30 years later, Popyrina is once again combining her artistic sensibilities and Jewish expression, designing a mikvah that carries decades of history and a unique connection to the Rebbes of Chabad.
A Wish of the Rebbe
On March 7, 1940, the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, boarded the S.S. Drottningholm at the port of Gothenburg, bound for the United States. He had spent years resisting the Soviet government’s campaign to shut down Jewish life, and had just narrowly escaped Nazi-occupied Europe via a journey that took him from Warsaw to Berlin to Riga, Latvia, then on to Stockholm. The ship that would bring him to the United States left from Gothenburg, a port city that was merely a point of departure. He might have just been traveling through, but the Rebbe paid attention to the state of life there as well: In a letter to a Chassid, the Sixth Rebbe expressed his wish that a mikvah be built in the city.
For nearly 50 years, a mikvah in Gothenburg remained an unrealized dream.
In 1988, the Sixth Rebbe’s son-in-law and successor, the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, directed Rabbi Avraham Glick—a Chabad Chassid in London with business connections in Scandinavia—to ensure a mikvah was built in Gothenburg. Glick took to the task, and oversaw the construction of a mikvah in the basement of a building belonging to the local Jewish community on Storgatan Street.
The following year, Rabbi Alexander and Leah Namdar were married, intending to heed the Rebbe’s call to serve as emissaries to bring Judaism to every Jew in the world, and were ready to serve wherever they would be sent.
“At the time, there were locations around the world that were looking for emissaries of the Rebbe,” said Rabbi Namdar. “But when we asked the Rebbe which to choose, he selected Gothenburg.”
The young couple arrived in 1991 to find the mikvah largely unused. They spent the next years encouraging the community to learn more about the mitzvah of mikvah and teaching about Family Purity. When the Jewish community eventually decided to sell the Storgatan building, the Namdars decided to build a new mikvah inside their own Chabad center.
In 2011, with funding from Mikvah.org and the Mayim Chaim Fund, they converted a small indoor Scandinavian-style pool into a halachically certified space. In the years since, it has served locals, tourists and brides
The building that housed the Chabad center, and the mikvah, had its own history to reckon with. It had been constructed in the 1940s by a Swede who helped found the Swedish Antisemitic Union and maintained close ties to Nazi leader Hermann Göring.
“An elderly man once walked in and asked who the original owner of the building was,” Leah Namdar recalls. “When we told him, his face turned white. He said he had never dared come to this part of town out of fear of this known antisemite. The fact that a place with such a dark history has been transformed into a bastion of Jewish light in our city is truly inspiring.”
‘Our Renovation Continues That Vision’
In 1975, the Rebbe launched his mitzvah campaign focusing on Family Purity. At that time, mikvah observance was rarely discussed in public, and many Jewish families were unfamiliar with this foundational mitzvah.
By placing it alongside core mitzvot like Shabbat and kosher, the Rebbe emphasized that Family Purity was not a marginal practice but a foundational pillar of Jewish life. He urged communities to immediately build mikvahs and beautify existing ones, insisting they be clean, attractive, even luxurious spaces that Jewish women would feel comfortable and proud using.
By 2025, the Namdars felt it was time to elevate Gothenburg’s mikvah space. When they considered who might lead the redesign, Popyrina was the obvious choice.
The Namdars and Popyrina have been working together to meet the highest standards on both the halachic and aesthetic fronts. So far, the pool, shower and jacuzzi rooms have already been constructed, while permits for the entrance and arch will be ready soon. Throughout the majority of this project, with the exception of only a few days, the mikvah has remained open and available for the community’s continuous use.
“In designing this mikvah, I wanted to create an atmosphere where light, water, and the warmth of bronze tones come together in harmony, a space that feels timeless, peaceful, and deeply alive. Water symbolizes renewal and purity, while the soft reflection of light on natural materials creates a feeling of calm and inner connection,” Popyrina shares. “This project carries history, faith, and renewal, and I feel privileged to express these spiritual ideas through design.”
This mikvah has a unique feature: the sink that will be in the lobby was used regularly by the Rebbe for over 40 years. It previously was housed outside the Rebbe’s room at Chabad World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, and was given to Rabbi Namdar when he and his family assisted in replacing it with a new one. The Namdars brought the old sink with them to Gothenburg in 1991, and it will be used in Sweden for the first time in the newly renovated mikvah.
“When you enter the mikvah you immediately feel the holiness. This is a space that elevates the physical, and it is lovely that this most important mitzvah, which is the basis for the survival of the Jewish people, is also such a beautiful and exquisite home,” adds community member Sara Lejderman. “In Gothenburg, we used to have a kosher but small mikvah, in a shoddy basement. Now, we finally have a mikvah befitting of queens. As a mikvah user of many years, this mikvah is a true blessing.”
“It brings me so much joy to see the vision of two of our great Rebbes come to fruition in this way,” Namdar concludes. “We hope that this will help increase the observance of this mitzvah and bring more Jewish life to our city.”
To support the renovation of the mikvah in Gothenburg, click here.
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