Mikva’ot, also known as Jewish “ritual baths,” feature prominently in state sponsored and grassroots heritage projects across Israel/Palestine, Italy, Poland, and Spain. Whether flowing or desiccated, the historic pools are increasingly deployed by private and public actors, and their critics, across diverse geographical contexts for political, educational, and cultural purposes as sites of living memory. Nationalistic projects that center mikva’ot and their preservation betray the high stakes of heritage fabrication and its profound implications for local communities and the historical record. Drawing on multi-sited, ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019-2023, this interdisciplinary, critical heritage study throws light on contradictions in place-based statecrafting and memory work rooted in polarizing constructions of Jewish history and rhetorics of unearthing and (un)belonging in the wake of state violence. It takes as it point of departure the various ways in which state and municipal authorities, private stakeholders, and community actors formulate the interpretive potential of mikveh sites for a general, largely touristic, public. These stewards-cum-interpreters, whose professions range from tour guides to civil servants to community leaders, play a significant role in the perpetuation and promulgation of place-based, mikveh-centered narratives of Jewish presence and absence. This project examines the circuitous and often troubled relationships between and across these heritage landscapes. It also probes the manifold possibilities they present for rethinking reconciliatory and redemptive narratives surrounding Jewish heritage in Europe and the Middle East. It does so to present critical openings for understanding the potentiality of water and water-related sites as forms of shared inheritance beyond the limitations of heritage preservation paradigms, and in ways that see sites of memory beyond nationalistic rhetorics of ownership, extraction, and commodification.