Vanguard News Network
VNN Media
VNN Digital Library
VNN Reader Mail
VNN Broadcasts

Old September 12th, 2009 #1
Gabry Ponte
Banned
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Posts: 2,024
Default Jewish prostitutes and pimps

A Forgotten Episode In Jewish History
From Name Witheld
5-3-2

Dear Jeff, I am a member of one of the most reputable families in Israel. While everybody knows that 50 years ago, my granfather was a Rabbi and a Mayor, no one knows that my other grandfather had brothels in the Middle East and India in the 30's. This fact always puzzelled and bothered me, it was kept a secret in the family. I could never comprehend that my grandather who is a member of the 'chosen people' could possibly be a pimp. Like most Jews, I did a search of my family's Jewish history on the world famous website: http://www.jewishgen.org/.

To my surprise I found out the my grandfather was not unique, we Jews controlled much of the prostitution business worldwide at the beginning of the last century. I am enclosing one particular episode which really touched me, you may want to post it in memory of these poor Jewish women. Please do not post my name or address.

A FORGOTTEN EPISODE IN JEWISH HISTORY

We now come of a very sordid period in Jewish history. Late in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews controlled the trade in white slavery, which is a polite way of saying prostitution. And they did so worldwide. Reputable historians claim Jews ran brothels in Shanghai, India, Turkey, Argentina, Brazil and New York City.

Women for the trade were procured in the following way: After the Eastern European pogroms, many young Jewish women became orphans who were without skills. As orphans they lacked dowries, which meant that arranged marriages were out of the question for them. During those years, only men received Yeshiva education, and if they were to marry and continue their education, they needed a wife with a dowry.

A charming young man, with plenty of cash, would show up in an Eastern European town and seek out a beautiful Jewish orphan. He would connect with her through an organization and eventually offer to marry her. After the marriage had been consummated, he would excuse himself because he had business commitments in another city, and leave, but not before giving his new wife a steamship ticket to Buenos Aires and promising to meet her there. When the wife would arrive in Buenos Aires or Rio, her husband was nowhere to be seen, but someone presenting herself as his aunt would meet the young woman.

Typically, these young ladies, some not older than 18 years, without any skills, with no education and without family, were told by these "aunts" in so many words that they either become prostitutes or would starve to death. Although many women faced with this situation committed suicide, others adapted.

Because these women and their pimps were considered "impure" by the regular Jewish community, they were ostracized. At the end of their lives they were not allowed to be buried in the existing Jewish cemeteries. To deal with this situation, the women and their pimps established their own cemeteries and synagogues. Incidentally, the word in Portuguese for pimp, is cafetăo, a word derived from kaftan, the long black silk robes worn by orthodox Jews.

In his book "Prostitution and Prejudice: the Jewish Fight against White Slavery - 1870-1939", Edward J. Bristow quotes my father after he had visited several cemeteries where Jewish prostitutes were buried. My father reported that their average age was about 20 years. My father surreptitiously copied the wording of many tombstones. According to my dad, a typical tombstones might be inscribed in Yiddish or Portuguese: "Ruchelle, beloved daughter of Shmuel and Hanna O, of (the name of the village in Eastern Europe), 1900-1920".

One unfortunate result of Jewish-controlled white slavery was that anti-semites in Europe used the information to paint all Jews as unworthy, as criminals, and deserving of expulsion from their country. Fortunately, Jewish communities that had been initially timid in dealing with this issue eventually rallied and worked throughout the world to stamp out this blemish, finally succeeding. So much so that today many Jews have not heard of this shameful episode in Jewish history.

By 1960, the Jewish prostitutes of Latin America had all but disappeared. Most had died, as did their associates and associations.

Recent Brazilian Jewish historians have been more charitable when writing about these women and their plight. Brazilian historian Beatriz Kushnir has pointed out that the women and their men, despite being ostracized by the Jewish community, maintained their Jewish identity by creating their own synagogues, cemeteries and even mutual help societies that duplicated those of the regular community. According to Kushnir, they kept Jewish holidays and some even kept the kashrut. In recent years the Jewish community of Săo Paulo has allowed the reburial in its regular cemetery of those who initially had been laid to rest in a cemetery restricted to Jewish prostitutes. But instead of burying them with names on their tombstones, they were given numbers.

I have just received a clipping from a Brazilian newspaper reporting that a director is planning a film dealing with the story of a Jewish woman immigrant from Poland who was forced into prostitution, etc. It is based on a book by Moacyr Scliar, a Brazilian Jewish writer.

The woman in this film had been promised marriage. That didn't occur on her arrival in Rio, and her only option for survival turned out to be prostitution. Furthermore, in the story, the woman only speaks Yiddish. The Brazilian, non-Jewish, soap-opera actress chosen for the part has been learning to speak Yiddish for her part in the film.


http://www.jewishgen.org/infofiles/BrazilianJewry.htm



[IMG][/IMG]
 
Old September 12th, 2009 #2
Gabry Ponte
Banned
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Posts: 2,024
Default

There is nothing more distressing in this world than for a nice Jewish man to be taken down by a professional Jewish woman who turns out to be a prostitute. Jewish men are after all raised to be very sensitive about sexual affairs with women due to their religous belief system and it becomes almost impossible for many Jewish men to accept that some Jewish women have joined the oldest profession in the world,prostitution,and will take advantage of their good nature to make a quick profit off of them.

A scam of this nature in Israel involves professional Jewish women from Los Angeles coming to Israel to make the rounds so to speak. These women are usually extremely attractive and talented at conning men into believing they are sincere making it appear as if they may be frustrated actresses who simply have not gotten the opportunities they want in Hollywood.

These women hang around beach communities such as Herzilia and come onto men who are in town alone. They play up to the emotions primarily of lonely Jewish businessmen and once they enter their hotel rooms with them they come on like fire. Be very careful with these women who are professionals and sometimes carry weapons. They will ask you for $200 or more after a sexual affair and threaten to steal the money from you if you do not want to give them the money.

And,so foreign men must be very careful in Israel. These days you can not trust anybody on the surface,including some of the Jewish women who could cause you almost as much trouble as the terrorists. I suppose Arab businessmen are prime targets for these women too who will also take advantage of their good nature.

It appears as if crooked Israeli police officers may be involved with these women,but they deny this is so.

Harold Mandel
Reporter
Mandel News Service
http://www.geocities.com/haroldmandel/news.ht...
 
Old September 12th, 2009 #3
Gabry Ponte
Banned
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Posts: 2,024
Default

Drucaroff lectures on plight of Jewish prostitutes in Argentina

by SHILPA BOPPANA | November 27, 2007

On Tuesday, November 20th, Elsa Drucaroff, author of The Promised Hell: A Zwi Migdal Prostitute lectured on the plight of Jewish prostitutes in Argentina.
Drucaroff is Argentinean and Jewish. “My father is Jewish,” she said, so "for me, Jewish culture was an important part of life.” This interest spurred her research into the Argentinean government’s virtual endorsement of prostitution, and the Jewish women it affected.

Argentina’s government unofficially condoned prostitution from the 1860s to the 1940s because of the massive profits the state received from the brothels’ taxes. “It [prostitution] was a voluntary policy decision of the Argentine state. It was not just allowed, but encouraged. Argentina was a Catholic state, but it believed that prostitution was a necessary evil that protected good women, families, and the gender order,” Drucaroff said.
Corruption and state profit prevented the closing and regulation of brothels. “Prostitution was a very important source of money. Brothels paid lots of taxes to the city. Twenty-five percent of the state’s money in 1920 came from brothel taxes. It [prostitution] was not a problem of Jewish people; it was a very good business for the state,” she said.

Drucaroff spoke about the Zwi Migdal, an Argentinean Jewish association of pimps that lured impoverished European women to work in Argentina’s brothels. “The association paid for travels to Poland to look for girls. They looked for disempowered girls living in miserable places."
A major obstacle in shutting down organizations such as Zwi Migdal was corruption. According to Drucaroff, “They [Zwi Migdal] had a legal association. They built a building and their own cemetery. They knew they could buy policemen and judges."

Zwi Migdal was founded in 1906, though the activity of Jewish pimps started decades earlier. “It [Zwi Migdal] stopped when we had a fascist coup d’etat. The new general said that he would purify the country. Of course, prostitution did not stop."

Drucaroff also discussed the mainstream Jewish community’s reaction to prostitution and its attempts to shun those who trafficked in women. “The Jews were very scared of anti-Semitism. They didn’t allow the pimps to go to synagogue or be buried, they didn’t allow them to be Jewish. In some movie theatres, there would be a Yiddish sign, ‘Pimps not allowed’,” she said.
Drucaroff’s novel, The Promised Hell: A Zwi Migdal Prostitute, draws on her research about the era. “The book is the story of a Polish girl who comes to Argentina to work as a prostitute. The story is fiction, but I know the real factors. I know it exists in my community,” she said.
 
Old September 12th, 2009 #4
Gabry Ponte
Banned
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Posts: 2,024
Default

The Jewish Prostitutes of South America (Series: The Writing Life)
By Isabel Vincent

Ms. Vincentis the author of Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas 1860 to 1939 (William Morrow & Company, 2005).

In the summer of 2002 just as I felt I was beginning to make progress on the research for my book Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced Into Prostitution in the Americas, the Brazilian national soccer team won the World Cup, becoming the first team in history to win the Earth’s most prestigious soccer championship four times.

Moments after the victory, Brazilians across the country took to the streets to celebrate. In Rio de Janeiro, where I was living at the time, the drug-lords who ruled the hillside shantytowns celebrated with loud bursts of gun fire which seemed to echo throughout the city. Thousands of people, dressed in the green, blue and yellow of the Brazilian flag, sambaed on the beaches and blocked traffic.

Of course, none of this should have had any influence on my research into the lives of Jewish women from Eastern Europe who were forced to work as prostitutes in Brazil, Argentina and the United States between 1860 and 1939. But when a proud nation of 180-million people decides to go into spontaneous party mode, the country seems to grind to a halt.

The National Library, where I had so painstakingly tracked down rare historical texts shut down for the victory celebrations. The National Archives, where I had become an almost daily visitor, poring over the yellowing copies of ships’ manifests dating to the beginning of the twentieth century, simply shut down without further notice.

But compared to the other problems I would encounter in my research into what is still considered a taboo subject in Brazil and Argentina, the World Cup victory seems today like a pleasant diversion.

In hindsight, I embarked on the research into the white slave trade rather naively. I certainly never expected “historians” in South America to escort me out of their offices and homes when I mentioned the Jewish prostitutes. I didn’t expect to find many of the police documents and hospital records pertaining to the thousands of impoverished women forced to work as prostitutes and shunned by their fellow Jews to have simply vanished without a trace.

I spent five years searching in vain for the registry book from the cemetery that the prostitutes established for themselves in 1916, in Inhauma, a bleak industrial suburb on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. It was during my first visit to the cemetery – a sad, overgrown tropical graveyard of broken gravestones and eerie silences – that I resolved to write a book about these women. I later found out that they had come to Brazil, to Argentina, the United States and even to South Africa and India to join their new “husbands.” Many of the women I profiled had been “married” in their down-at-heel shtetls to elegantly dressed strangers who promised them a better life in the New World. But once they arrived at their destinations, they were shuttered in brothels and cut off from their families and their coreligionists.

At the cemetery in Inhauma, you can still make out some of their faces in the sepia-toned plaques affixed to their graves. For decades, they have been condemned to silence, their stories still a source of deep shame for many of their descendents.

This was the reason that the registry book at the Inhauma cemetery had gone missing, or at least it was the theory of the cemetery’s faithful custodian, who has lived next door to the graveyard for the better part of the last forty years. Yes, there had been a registry book once, he told me. But after the final burials in the 1970s, it had simply disappeared, as had the regular visitors who came to pay their respects to the dead.

“Nobody comes here anymore,” said the custodian Daniel Rodrigues, who regularly clears the crude stone pathways of weeds and tries as best as he can to keep the cemetery from turning into a total ruin. In recent years the drug traffickers from the neighboring shantytown, known as the Wet Rat Favela, have scaled the cemetery walls and pried open the graves in order to hide their weapons and drugs from police.

“The people buried here came to Brazil to suffer,” said Rodrigues, on one of my visits to Inhauma. “And now their stories are forgotten.”

But as soon as I walked past the cemetery’s iron gates, which are adorned with a large Star of David, I was determined to tell those stories. My book details the stories of three such women. The first, thirteen-year-old Sophia Chamys, arrived in the country from a shtetl near Warsaw in the 1890s. Rebecca Freedman, the most famous of the prostitutes, arrived in 1916, and devoted her life to founding the women’s synagogue and running the burial society. The third, Rachel Liberman, sailed to Buenos Aires with her two children in the early 1920s, and later testified in court against the Zwi Migdal,the Warsaw- and Buenos Aires-based mafia that trafficked in Jewish women. Liberman’s testimony eventually led to the break-up of the powerful mafia.

At times, writing about the lives of these women seemed an impossible task, but the more difficult the research, the more inspired I became to see it through to its conclusion. There were almost no written histories or letters written by the women themselves to draw on because the majority of the women forced into prostitution were illiterate. Instead, I pieced together individual stories from police records, academic studies and interviews. I was lucky enough to find the minutes of meetings for the Society of Truth, the prostitutes’ mutual aid organization in Rio, dating back to the 1930s, and stretching into the 1960s. I was also lucky enough to find the Society’s final accountant, an elderly black man with a noble disposition.

“There was nobody like them,” said the accountant, Alberto da Costa, who is now 82. “I will never forget them.” I found Alberto’s name among the minutes of the Society of Truth. I was sure it would be impossible to find him, and was quite startled when I plugged his name into the Rio telephone directory, and found myself speaking to him about women like Rebecca Freedman on the phone.

When he finally agreed to meet me in person, we sat sipping tiny cups of sweetened coffee in a high-rise shopping mall in Rio. I questioned Alberto about every aspect of the Society of Truth. At one point, Alberto had tears in his eyes when he spoke about the prostitutes. He told me that in the 1950s when they hired him to work at their synagogue, the women had taken up a collection to put him through school. He still wears the ring that they gave him when he graduated.

“I’ll speak to you,” he confided to me. “I want to honor their memory.”

With Bodies and Souls, I hope I have done just that.
 
Old September 12th, 2009 #5
Gabry Ponte
Banned
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Posts: 2,024
Default

I reproduce two excerpts of the book below.



Sophia's family received him with great warmth and countless apologies. Sophia, they said, is young and inexperienced. She knows nothing of life, they said. She's innocent. She's only thirteen. Isaac waved away their concerns, and to show his good faith, he promised to make their union official. There was no time for a proper wedding, he said. Could the Chamys family round up two witnesses, and could they meet in the shitbl for the ceremony?

Even though the wedding was organized in such haste, and would not be officiated by a religious leader, the Chamys family would not have thought anything amiss. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such ritual weddings were common in the smaller, poorer shtetls where rabbis were rarely present. The ceremony required only the presence of one Jewish witness, and was commonly referred to in Yiddish as a stille chuppah or "silent wedding."

In the presence of the witness, which in Sophia's case could have been the local cobbler or the tailor, Isaac would make her an offer of a ring or money, and the witness would pronounce the couple officially married. It's not clear what Isaac presented to Sophia as a token of his affection, but it became clear to police years later that this was not the first time that he had entered into such a union.

The ritual marriages had absolutely no validity under civil law, so women entering into these compromising situations had no legal protection. The practice had even been outlawed in some parts of Eastern Europe but continued in the more backward regions well into the twentieth century.

Of course, this was very convenient for pimps like Isaac Boorosky, for whom the stille chuppah became a very important tool, allowing them to entrap ignorant women and rob them of their civil rights. It is not known how many impoverished young women Isaac married in these "silent weddings." It is clear that pimps working in America would typically return to Eastern Europe and travel from shtetl to shtetl acquiring multiple wives in stille chuppah ceremonies.

~38-39

~

As one prominent Jewish colonel noted in 1893, "In Buenos Aires there are Jews who are a disgrace to Judaism, and when I think of them, I am an anti-Semite of the most bigoted description."

But the traffickers refused to give up; they were determined to be respected Jews at any cost. At the turn of the last century, they bought their own cemetery in the outlying suburbs of Avellaneda. They also donated a portion of their profits to purchase a property where they maintained an office and a synagogue. When they established their headquarters on an upscale stretch of Cordoba Steet in Buenos Aires, most of the members were tapped for donations. The donor list was found years later by investigating authorities, who noted with interest that most of the donations were objects used to outfit the synagogue. According to the list, Simon Briel donated a chandelier for the women's bathroom. M.A. Rosmarin donated a velvet sheath emboridered with gold for the Torah, while Selij Rubinach gave a set of Bibles. David Brostein donated an oak altar.

Their bourgeois sensibilities extended to charitable causes. Men like Isaac clearly wanted to be remembered after they died. In Sholem Aleichem's "The Man from Buenos Aires," the pimp Motek enumerates a dizzying array of his pressing social responsibilities: "There isn't a thing in the world that doesn't cost me money- synagogues, hospitals, emigrant funds, concerts. Not so long ago I received a letter from a yeshiva In Jerusalem. A handsome letter with a Star of David on top, with seals and signatures of rabbis. The letter was addressed to me personally in very impressive language: 'To our Master, the Renowned and Wealthy Reb Mordecai.'"

~72

*
There's something sickening about people desiring money earned through prostituting innocent women to support Torah institutions...although I suppose one can look at it the other way and say that even a pimp was able to do some good for his religion.

Vincent explores the community the Jewish prostitutes formed in Brazil, specifically those brought there through the Zwi Migdal trade ring. Set apart from the respectable Jewish community, which refused to aid them, uninterested in how they came to be there, and even the fact that they many of them were raped, brutalized, or otherwise forced into their lot, they had no recourse but to create their own community. They had no alternative, as there was no sense of community amongst the prostitutes. The Brazilian prostitutes turned against the Jewish women in an anti-Semitic fit; they accused the Jews of bringing anal sex and sadomasochism to Brazil. Nevertheless, some of the Jewish prostitutes prevailed. They created a society referred to as the Society of Truth, really managed by a former prostitute named Rebecca Freedman who also purchased a cemetery for the prostitutes and created her own Chevra Kadisha for them. The irony of a Jewish prostitute performing taharos for the other women whom the respectable Jewish community chose to ignore is almost monstrous.

The portrait raised by the book is also saddening in that rabbis were for the most part unconcerned:
In any case, he had no time for mad feminists. He was the spiritual leader of Budapest's Jewish congregation. He had more important things to think about, more important things to do than to speak to this diminutive spinster with the acid tongue. "The issue [of white slavery] doesn't interest me," he said.

When he was reminded of his role as the chairman of the Society for the Protection of Children, the rabbi seemed to shrug off his responsibilities to protect them from slave traffickers. "Yes," he said without batting an eyelid. "But only of children up to twelve or thirteen years of age. The older ones are not my business."


At turns, sad, depressing, horrifying or otherwise moving, this fascinating window into the un-romantic version of shtetl life, apparently also depicted in the short story mentioned above by Shalom Aleichem entitled "The Man from Buenois Aires." This is definitely not the picture you will get when you watch Hollywood films or read romanticized versions of the shtetl in Jewish books.
 
Old September 12th, 2009 #6
Gabry Ponte
Banned
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Posts: 2,024
Default

[IMG][/IMG]
 
Reply

Share


Thread
Display Modes


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 02:48 PM.
Page generated in 0.12445 seconds.