A municipal swimming pool just recently opened in Efrat. The designers worked hard to figure out a way to balance the desire for family swimming while also allowing for religious sensitivities against mixed swimming to be adhered to...

While most pools in such mixed communities will designate hours for mixed swimming and hours for separate swimming, in Efrat they decided to innovate and they came up with the creation of a built in mechitza that has be raised from the bottom of the pool and lowered back down when no longer needed. With the pool being 8 swimming lanes wide, the mechitza down the middle will leave four lanes for men and four for women when the wall is up.

It seems to me to be a lot of innovation for one benefit - lowering the wall for the hours of family swim makes it like any other pool with no mechitza that has hours for family swim. Raising the wall means women and men can swim at the same time but separately rather than having to schedule men at a certain time of day and women at a different time of day. I guess the same could have been accomplished by building two pools. I wonder which would have been cheaper, though the idea of a wall in the pool that goes up and down is cool.

JPost has a picture of it, though the picture just looks like a swimming pool with a wall. they should have taken a picture where you can see both sides of the pool with the wall in the middle...