Prostitution/Trafficking in Jewish Communities
Approximately 95 percent of teenage prostitutes have been sexually abused
1 in 100 U.S. children are victims of sex trade industry
The most commonly cited reason for engaging in prostitution by survivors of childhood sexual abuse, was that they were trying to regain some control over their lives and their bodies; exchanging sex for money was seen as one way to control men's access to them. -- prevent-abuse-now.com
Most prostitutes have been victimized, at some point in their lives, by sexual violence. More than 90% suffered childhood sexual abuse, often incest. Many others have been sexually assaulted in the course of working in prostitution. About 75% were violently raped as adults in situations not involving their work.
At least two-thirds of prostitutes began working in prostitution before the age of 16. Young women and men often enter prostitution as a way of escaping an abusive home situation. They see prostitution as their only means of survival.
Unfortunately at this point and time there has never been any reseach to find out what percentage of Jewish Survivors of sexual abuse also have histories of prostitution. The odds are that the statistics are no different then in other populations. If you know of any research or resources that would be helpful to Jewish Survivors of Childhood Abuse who have histories of Prostitution, or Adult survivors who got involved in Prostitution, please send the information to: VickiPolin@TheAwarenessCenter.org
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Articles
Pretty posers prop up Naked Tango (04/29/1992)
We must address Israeli prostitution as our problem (02/28/1998)
Selling Sex in Israel (2001)
Israeli, int'l police crack down on child pornography (01/28/2001)
A-G calls for crackdown on trafficking in women (08/01/2001)
Fighting the flesh trade (12/02/2001)
Blue-and-white slave trade (06/21/2002)
Young Girls At Risk (04/28/2003)
Victoria's, and Israel's, Ugly Secret (01/31/2004)
Panel hears grim details on child prostitution in Israel (02/10/2004)
Parents send kids to work as prostitutes (02/10/2004)
Police have list of 70 trafficking suspects, hearing told (02/18/2004)
Mothers pimping their daughters for food (02/29/2004)
Ex-sex slaves get help to testify (03/04/2004)
Prostitute's lawsuit (03/09/2004)
Study: Brothels earn $450m. a year (03/17/2004)
Three Knesset commissions of inquiry to shut down (03/17/2004)
Police may seize property of suspected trafficker in women (03/18/2004)
All for love (09/09/2005)
Law seeks to get tough on cyber sex with minors (01/09/2007)
The best little whorehouse in Haifa (02/07/2007)
Israel improves in addressing human trafficking problem (06/13/2007)
Haifa area brothels shut down (08/01/2007)
Case of The Zwi Migdal: Three Jewish Women Forced Into Prostitution in the Americas
For more cases of Prostitution: Clergy Abuse: Rabbis, Cantors and Other Trusted Officials
Sexual Trafficking - Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (07/12/2000)
Articles
Legal/Law Enforcement/Goverment
Pretty posers prop up Naked Tango
BY CATHERINE DUNPHY TORONTO STAR
The Toronto Star - April 29, 1992
You've seen those fashion spreads in some of the higher-concept glossies? Vogue magazine, for instance, where unreal meets surreal and real people are whitefaced into blankface?
They are mere lines and angles, reduced to a foot just so, a hat brim angled more so, the face - never as important as the image, the line - shadowed.
The look, such style, such sophistication, you've thought. But, a small unbidden voice inside may have piped up, so silly.
You've just summed up Naked Tango.
This is the directorial debut of Leonard Shrader, the man who wrote (and was nominated for an Oscar for) Kiss Of The Spider Woman. He wrote this one too. This, however, has less to do with the finished project than the fact that the co-producer (one Milena Canonero) is a costume designer. This movie is so heavy into poses, it should have been in Vogue. Or Madonna should've been in it.
Instead, languishing, leaning, lounging to the right and left (and never, never blocking the view of the memorable and fantastical moody sets) are Cesar-winning French actress Mathilda May and American Vincent D'Onofrio.
D'Onofrio can be seen to far better advantage right now in Robert Altman's The Player. He's the murdered writer.
May has worked in 23 other French and Italian language films, including Claude Chabrol's Le Cri d'hiboux, for which she won France's equivalent of an Oscar.
In Naked Tango she is a prop; he is a prop, too. As lovers who hate each other, occasionally she will clench, he glower, she quiver, his nostrils will flare.
Very occasionally.
Most of the time they arch their necks (her) or backs (him) and stand. Or dance. But never deliver.
Naked Tango is a bloodless, passionless rendering of a time and place rife with glamour and macabre mythology, and of a story that cannot possibly be true, but is.
And centring on and based on a dance banned in public until 1919. At first danced exclusively by men, the tango supposedly imitated the sinister, deadly moves of the street gangs flourishing in Buenos Aires then. When Valentino danced a fandangled tango in Four Horseman Of The Apocalypse, its secret was out and the dance was open to Europeanized (read sanitized) variations.
But in the underworld of Buenos Aires, it was always a naked mime of sinewy lust (not love), machismo, obsession and danger.
It was the dance of the gangster; it was danced in La Boca, the waterfront slum where legalized prostitution opened the door to white slavery and turf wars between different ethnic based mafia-type organizations.
In Naked Tango, a young bride (May) becomes a prisoner in a brothel when she bolts from her older, staid husband the judge (the veteran Spanish actor Fernando Rey). She assumes the identity of a young Polish Jew whose impoverished family have sold her into marriage in Argentina for a dowry.
But the traditional Jewish wedding is a sham, as is the ardent husband ( Bad Boys' Esai Morales) who is a sleek, feral gangster, under the thumb of an even crueller character, the tango master Cholo (D'Onofrio).
When this gangster meets the would-be whore, they don't talk, they dance. The violins throb, the high heels (his) writhe on the smooth floor as they slide into the shadows (for more artful camera work) into an abbatoir (in case we hadn't cottoned on to the dance/danger connection) and through Colossus-sized limbs of women in silk stockings, statuary in a brothel part Arabian night, part nightmare.
Shrader has made the whole thing impossible and improbable, yet this outlandish garish tale is true. Or at least fact-based.
There actually was a Zwi Migdal Society or Polish/Jewish Immigrants Self Help Society, a gangster-run operation that ruled the Buenos Aires waterfront for 24 years. At the height of its power, it had 400 members and ran 1,000 brothels filled with some 30,000 women they'd lured from Europe with promises of a traditional Jewish wedding.
As appalling as this heretofore hidden slice of history is, it is a powerhouse of a story. Think of the movie it might make.
Might still make.
As long as it, too, doesn't turn an electrifying true story into a dated dance poster.
Naked Tango
With Vincent D'Onofrio and Mathilda May. Written/directed by Leonard Shrader. R. At the Cumberland.
GRAPHIC: Photo Vincent D'Onofrio
We must address Israeli prostitution as our problem
By Leonard Fein
Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, San Francisco - November 24, 1998
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/9173/format/html/displaystory.html
It came as a shock: Jewish "women of the night."
That was all the way back in 1960, glimpsing the streetwalkers as I was driving through Jaffa. Instinctively, I did what just about all Jews who cared for Israel had long since learned to do: I made excuses and developed relatively benign rationales. File under goy k'chol hagoyim, a nation like all others, and just hope that file stays much, much smaller than the or lagoyim -- the lamp unto the nations file.
But before I'd had the time to tuck the matter away, a second and untuckable problem tumbled in. If there are Jewish whores, then Jewish pimps cannot be far behind. Jewish pimps? How can such a thing be? For the women they exploit, one can feel sympathy. But for the pimps? Vile, unacceptable. Where in your Zionist files do you lose them?
The answer is, of course, that you don't. The answer is that life is complicated, and Judaism is not a vaccine. The answer, if you hang around long enough, is Jewish arms merchants and Jewish bank robbers and Jewish wife-beaters and all manner of Jewish miscreants -- not, heaven forbid, in greater proportion than the foul of any other people, perhaps even, here and there, in smaller proportion. So why not Jewish pimps, too?
And you live with that answer and learn to handle all the bad stuff along with the decisive good. Your theory of Zion becomes more sophisticated, expansive enough to include Zion's manifest imperfections.
But then, suddenly, you learn that it's not garden-variety pimps you're encountering, petty hustlers out of Israel's underside. No, suddenly you learn that Israel has become a routine destination for the global trafficking of women, women coerced into prostitution.
The thousand such women brought into Israel annually derive principally from the countries of the former Soviet Union, and the way they get to Israel is that they are "purchased," each one costing between $10,000 and $20,000. And they are, of course, expected to repay the cost to their masters through what amounts to indentured servitude -- or, if you prefer the simpler and more straightforward, slavery.
Most of these women, these slaves, are in their early 20s, but some as young as 15, and even 12, have turned up in Tel Aviv. They are, according to the Haifa Police commander, routinely beaten, tortured, raped and drugged. They are isolated, deprived, threatened, their documents are destroyed. Indeed, they are told that if they are disobedient or seek to contact the police or the courts, their families back home will be punished.
How can such a monstrous crime persist? The answer, one supposes, is the same answer to the question asked about any country that makes room for trafficked women. Each woman earns between $50,000 and $100,000 a year for her pimp; the total turnover of the prostitution trade in Israel comes to some $450 million a year. And some Israeli experts believe that the Israeli police allow the pimps to operate because they make good snitches, they provide the police with information about other and presumably more serious crimes.
Chaim Nachman Bialik, the poet of the Hebrew renaissance, once said that he yearned for the day when there would be in (then) Palestine a Jewish jail, with a Jewish guard on the outside and a Jewish prisoner on the inside. But this? There is such a thing as "too normal."
The Israel Women's Network, Rabbis for Human Rights and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel are all "on the case," and the Supreme Court and Knesset may soon intervene to inhibit the trade. But no one predicts an early and genuinely comprehensive effort to put an end to it.
We are told that we should not wash Israel's dirty linen in public. But when the dirty linen is hanging out there for all to see, is it not proper that its energetic washing also be visible -- along with efforts to prevent the linen's soiling in the first place? After all, this is not a hawk vs. dove problem, nor an Orthodox vs. everybody else problem. It is about as basic a problem as you can have.
For those who operate in a traditional context, perhaps Purim, with its obvious references to the exploitation of women, will suffice. For all of us, we can now see the underside of globalization. Even if we are less emotionally engaged with the issue of women's slavery when it plays out in Kuwait or in Germany than when it plays out in Israel, our response to the Israeli manifestation cannot be successful if it is compartmentalized.
And anyway, those other women, the ones who are sold off to countries outside our scope of concern -- they, too, are women, girls really, and someone has to stand up for them, too. No?
The writer is founder and former editor of Moment magazine and a Boston-based writer for American Jewish newspapers.
Anna O's Other Story: Freud's Famous
Patient's Crusade Against White Slavery
by Harold Ticktin
Moment (Washington) - Aug 31, 1998
Anna O's Other Story: Freud's Famous Patient's Crusade Against White Slavery
WALLFLOWERS t the dance of Jewish history, sex, and crime have sat out almost all the numbers. Reticent to admit that Jewish mobsters trafficked in Jewish women, our historians concentrated instead on pogroms, keeping shweig (still) about our seamier side until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Only with the emergence of an earthier vein of Jewish literature -- from I.L. Peretz to Isaac Bashevis Singer, including even the saintly Sholom Aleichem and the roundly criticized Sholem Asch -- have some of the spicier aspects of Jewish history come to the fore.
No example is more interesting than the struggle against white slavery in Jewish communities from Constantinople to Buenos Aires, which would eventually involve one of Sigmund Freud's most important psychoanalyses, the famous case of "Anna O."
Purveyors of Jewish women to bordellos on five continents were aptly named "unclean ones." As with the reluctance of Jews to discuss Jewish alcoholism and violence, so it was with jewish involvement in whit e slavery. Often the trade was denied outright, despite an ultimately successful battle fought over a 70-year period by the organized Jewish community against Jewish pimps and brothel keepers who preyed principally on Jewish women from impoverished areas of the Russian empire, particularly Galicia.
The battle included a number of international conferences with active Jewish participation, and innumerable intra-Jewish meetings in Europe, the Americas, Turkey, and India, in which world Jewry simultaneously fought the "unclean ones" with- in the community and sought to deflate the all-too- easy assumption by gentiles that "the Jews caused it all."(*)
Prostitution may be the worlds oldest profession, but the numbers in its ranks have the 19th century, when rail- way systems spread rapidly across Eurasia to ports of embarkation such as Hamburg, London, and Le Havre.
The railroad spurred modernization, affecting Jewry like a lightning bolt. One could write a Ph.D. dissertation titled, "The Railroad in Jewish Literature 1875-1939." The nature of Jewish jokes changed, making for an indissoluble link between the Iron Horse and the bewildered Jew riding it. A joke that Freud was fond of tells of a Jewish man on his way from Warsaw to Baden-Baden, hassled and attacked at every railroad station because of his appearance. An acquaintance asks him where he's going. "To Baden-Baden, for my health," he answers, "if my constitution holds out." Another classic of the genre is Sholom Aleichem's "Two Anti-Semites," in which two Jews sharing a single railroad compartment are both reading anti-Semitic newspapers to deflect antagonism. When they discover the truth about their shared bacgrounds, they hum "Oyfn Pripichik" (a famous Yiddish song) together.
But transporting Jewish women from as far east as Bombay was no laughing matter. Perhaps because Jews simply did not see themselves as procurers, there was a long period of turning a blind eye to the extent and depth to which Mädchen-handlen flourished among Jews.
The tangled history of pimps and prostitutes faced with an outraged general and Jewish public is thoroughly explored in Edward J. Bristow's Prostitution and Prejudice.(1) Bristow documents a ready-made Jewish underworld eager to engage in pimping. The Buenos Aires branch of alfonsins (the Polish-Jewish epithet for pimps) even formed a fraternal society (Zwi Migdal), which maintained its own synagogue and cemetery.(2)
Although Jewish procurers dealt almost exclusively in Jewish women, they were successful enough to achieve 50 percent of the market in Hamburg, Eastern Europe, and South America, according to police records. The names alone conjure up a Jewish world: Aside from Harry the Mock, Crazy Itch, Charlie Argument, Ryfka the Cow, and an array of madams named Sadie, there is a supporting cast of alfonsins, bombiens (from Bombay), kaftismus (observant alfonsins), macks, freuenhandlers, and a host of other pejoratives.(3)
The weave which formed this history had many threads. Chief among them was the desperate poverty of five million Eastern European Jews virtually entombed in the Pale of Settlement. An uneducated Jewish girl (few were otherwise) could escape the ghetto by registering as a prostitute. Many of the pimps were Jewish men who, as boys, had been snatched from their homes and returned after 25 years of forced service in the Czarist Army. For many Jewish tavern keepers ("between the gates of purity and defilement," in the words of Chaim Nachman Bialik),(4) the transition from tavern keeping to brothel keeping was an easy one.
Still, while there are many causes, there are also no causes. Girls from backgrounds identical to those of prostitutes never entered the trade, and crazily enough, there were a number of success stories, such as Polly Adler's, which was popularly chronicled in her best-selling autobiography A House Is Not A Home.(5) Adler, born in Russia, was a female counterpart to Arnold Rothstein and Nicky Arnstein. Operating in New York during the '30s, she became the most celebrated madam of her day.
Paradoxically, aspects of Jewish religious life actually facilitated the trade. The most graphic example, a variation on the agunah (wives unable to prove the deaths of their disappeared husbands), was the practice of stillah chuppah (literally "silent chuppah"), that is, clandestine weddings done before witnesses and sealed with a gift. The stillah chuppah refers to an arcane point of Jewish law, not unlike common law, which holds that a rabbi is not necessary at a wedding ceremony. The presence of any attending adult (male) is sufficient in Jewish law to confer married status. Often practiced in precisely those districts where families were most desperate and unlearned in the subtleties of Jewish law, such marriages resulted, in what was referred to delicately as "irregular civil status." As Bristow explains, stillah chuppah enabled procurers to manoeuvre unsuspecting girls into compromising situations. Ruthless men would court them, marry them, and then coerce them to practice prostitution.... Such wives had no legal protection because their marriages were not registered in civil law. Yet, they thought themselves married and were recognized as such by traditional Jews.(6)
Books and plays often dealt with this touchy subject, which many would have preferred to leave alone. A prime example is Sholom Asch's play The God of Vengeance (1923), which portrayed the dilemma of a Jewish brothel keeper in New York, who attempts to separate the bordello he runs downstairs from the purity of his young daughter upstairs. The young daughter finds her way below, however, and has a lesbian affair with one of the I nafkes (whores). Prompted by the predictable rabbinic reaction to the play, I Vengeance was the first drama ever convicted of obscenity, a ruling later reversed by New York courts. Revived in recent years, Vengeance had a run in New York as recently as the fall of 1997.
Additional references to Jewish prostitution occur in the writings of Sholom Aleichem, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Aleichem's, The Gentlemen From Buenos Aires, features a Jewish procurer. Someone innocently asks him what he deals in. "Not in prayer books, my friend, not in prayer books," he replies, The story is set in Buenos Aires because -- along with Constantinople, Hamburg, Warsaw, New York, Rio De Janeiro, Manila, and, unexpectedly, Butte, Montana -- Buenos Aires was a principal destination for white slave traffickers right up to the beginning of World War II.
In one of Singer's early novels, The Magician of Lublin, the wife of an imprisoned gang member tells Yasha the Magician that she has an offer to go to America. "You mean New York?" asks Yasha. "No" she replies, "a different America." Yasha quickly informs her that in her circumstances "another America" means Buenos Aires and the offer is a veiled attempt to get her into a brothel.
Jews are represented in other fictional depictions of the trade of the time, such as Lincoln Steffen's Schloma, Daughter of Schmuhl, Elsa Jerusalem's The Red House; Sholem Asch's Mottke the Thief, Peretz Hirschbein's Miriam, and Moshe Richter's Schlaven Handler-Trafficker. One of modem Yiddish's three great progenitors, Mendele Mokher Sforim, weighed in with Valley of Tears.
Perhaps the most exotic reference comes from Rudyard Kipling, whose Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House, set in Calcutta's red-light district, included the following:
From Tarnau in Galicia
To Juan Bazar she came
To eat the bread of infamy
And take the wages of shame.(7)
Lest there be any doubt that the Galicia reference meant Jewesses, Lord Kitchener himself abetted the practice of encouraging European prostitutes -- largely Jewish -- for his troops in India, while discouraging English ones, to preserve "the moral character of the governing race." (8)
International Jewish prostitution was not eliminated until just before World War II. In the '20s and '30s, white slavery was actually a subbranch of the history of Jewish gangsters, boxers, and bootleggers.
The Jewish community faced the problem of how to work with the larger community to combat the international network of procurers. Jewish leaders intent on removing the worldwide scourge, and the embarrassing Jewish contribution in particular, were sometimes accused of responsibility for all white slavery. This accusation would surface despite extensive documentation that the trade was dominated by French, German, and Italian operators and that Jews dealt primarily with Jewish women. Consequently, those Jews working to suppress this sorry trade in Jewish poverty often found themselves stymied both by gentile accusations and by Jewish reluctance even to acknowledge that a problem existed.
It is precisely at this juncture that the best-known analysand of all time -- Bertha Pappenheim, more famously known as Freud's "Anna O" -- becomes a significant player. Anna O was the name given by Joseph Breuer and Freud to the young woman whose hysterical symptoms laid the foundation of psychoanalysis.(9) The pseudonym was used to guarantee anonymity to the young daughter of a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, who suffered from a bizarre set of hysterical symptoms after the death of her father, with whom she had been very close, having attended him as a nurse during his death throes. Breuer documented his "talking cure" treatment, in which he hypnotized her and traced each symptom back to a specific traumatic event, almost effecting a cure thereby.(10)
It was this remarkable case, about which Breuer consulted Freud long after the event, which ultimately moved Freud to write The Interpretation of Dreams (read for the first time at a Tuesday night meeting of his B'nai B'rith lodge in 1899, and sent to Theodore Herzl in hopes of a favorable review) and thence to develop his full-blown theories of psychoanalysis. It was not until 1953, however, when Freud's disciple Ernest Jones wrote a definitive biography of the master, that Anna O was revealed as Bertha Pappenheim, whose treatment was broken off by Breuer in 1882, after she fantasized that she was having Breuer's baby.(11) Frightened by this development, Breuer broke off the treatment and went on a second honeymoon with his wife.
Despite the treatment, young Pappenheim again broke down and spent several years in a sanitarium, never totally recovering her sexuality. She emerged as an early feminist in the 1880s, but her subsequent career has been all but overshadowed by the pseudonymous Anna O.(12)
In fact, Bertha Pappenheim, using her Warburg-related family wealth, played perhaps the most prominent role of any individual in the fight against white slavery involving Jews. From 1882, when Breuer gave up her treatment, to 1888, Pappenheim remained in a sanitarium. In 1888 she and her mother moved to Frankfurt, where she began her far-flung campaign on behalf of fallen Jewish women. From 1890 on she mounted one mighty endeavor after another. In Frankfurt she founded a girl's orphanage and, at the same time, established the Judischer Frauenbund, a feminist organization, which ultimately enrolled some 20 percent of all German Jewish women. In 1906 she also established a home for wayward girls and illegitimate babies there before traveling to Eurasia (where she visited with the Czar's family) and the Americas to pursue her cause.(13)
Pappenheim also launched a remarkable literary career, which included the private publication of The Rummage Store (using a male nom de plume) and a three-act play entitled "Women's Rights" (1899; this time with a female pseudonym). In an essay on Jewish women, she argued for emancipation.(14) She had an extended correspondence and friendship with philosopher Martin Buber, whose theories she candidly admitted were opaque to her. When she died in 1936, Buber wrote a warm obituary, presumably never knowing Pappenheim was Anna O.(15) All this from a woman whom Joseph Breuer said would be better off dead.(16)
Even after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Papenheim continued to expand her network of more than 60 stations, staffed by volunteers wearing armbands which read "for women, by women." Her work, in the end, was a major factor in dismantling the Zwi Migdal in Buenos Aires and ridding the entire trade of the "unclean ones."(17)
Thus it is that a proper Viennese Jewess appears in history at the end of the 19th century as a patient in the foundational case of psychoanalysis and then reappears in the 20th century as a heroine in the struggle against white slavery. Given the success of her second role, as compared to her first (she vigorously opposed the suggestion of psychotherapy for her charges),(18) it may well be that Freud's Anna O deserves far less recognition than Bertha Pappenheim.
(1) Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice (New York: Schocken, 1982).
(2) Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 120.
(3) Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 169.
(4) "Avi," from My Father, collected poems of Chaim Nachman Bialik (Tel Aviv, 1935).
(5) Polly Adler, A House Is Not a Home (New York: Cader, 1953).
(6) Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 103-104.
(7) Rudyard Kipling, Vase Definitive E Dictim (New York: Doubleday, 1940), pp.40-43.
(8) Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 144.
(9) Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 73 et. seq.
(10) Breuer, The Life Work of Sigmund Freud (London: Penguin, 1961), pp. 202-204.
(11) Lucy Freeman, The Story of Anna O (New York: Paragon House, 1990) p.61.
(12) Freeman, Story of Anna O, pp.73-79.
(13) Freeman, Story of Anna O, pp. 61-75, 91-96.
(14) Freeman, Story of Anna O, p.121.
(15) His exact words were: "I not only admired her but loved her and will love her until the day I die." (Freeman, p. 173).
(16) Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 305; Freeman, Story of Anna O, p. 143.
(17) Freeman, Story of Anna O, p.150.
(18) There are a number of little-known connections among Bertha Pappenheim; Breuer, and Freud. Breur's family differed sharply with Jones' characterization of their relative (Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O, [New York: Routledge, 1996], pp. 108-109). The Bernay family (Freud's wife, Martha, was a Bernay) were close to the Pappenheims and may have been related. The two girls knew each other well (Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O, p. 34; Freeman, Story of Anna O, p. 211). Freud, who never knew his wife's friend, was reliably reported to have explained Pappenheim's subsequent career as a vindication of his theories because it was "all a preoccupation with sexuality" (Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O, p. 98). This is quite consistent with Freud's criticism of Breuer to the effect that Breuer held the keys in his hand but failed to open the door.
(*) As early as 1908, Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: "In no other city in Western Europe could the relationship between Jewry and prostitution and even now the white slave traffic be studied better than in Vienna...an icy shudder ran down my spine when seeing for the first time the jew as an evil, shameless and calculating manager of this shocking vice, the outcome of the scum of the big city."
Photo (The red-light district of Buenos Aires)
By Paula Amann
Washington Jewish Week/Jewsweek - 2001
http://www.jewsweek.com/society/059.htm
They come to Israel from the Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova looking for freedom. Instead they are sold as sex slaves. And you thought Israel was holy.
Jewsweek.com | Their names are Natalya, Oxana or Svetlana. They come to Israel, as immigrants do, for a better life. But their dreams of working as a waitress, nurse, or au pair turn nightmarish upon their arrival.
Their fellow countryman who met them at the airport, speaking the language of home, takes them to a locked apartment with barred windows and a phone that only takes incoming calls, where they are forced to provide sexual services to strangers.
Those who rebel risk being raped, beaten, or starved. Even those who knew they were going into prostitution are shocked by the stark conditions, the pay of roughly 20 shekalim ($5) a day or less for their labor.
This disturbing story unfolds all too often at the hotline for Migrant Workers, a Tel Aviv agency founded in 1998 to protect the human rights of foreign workers, victims of sex trafficking among them. The hotline takes as its motto the familiar line from Exodus 22:20: "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."
Agency director and co-founder Sigal Rozen, along with the group's counsel, Nomi Levenkron, were in Washington, D.C., last week to give a lecture at the Johns Hopkins Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, to network and to speak with supporters. Among them are the New Israel Fund, which has given the hotline a total of $19,000 during the past year and a half.
In an interview, Rozen called sex trafficking an "unorganized crime," based largely on personal networks of immigrants from the Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova.
"... "It's easier being a trafficker than being a plumber ..." --Nomi Levenkron
Those three countries alone accounted for 91 percent of the 474 women arrested in brothels and deported from Israel in 2000, according to figures compiled by hotline volunteers during visits to the Neveh Tirzah women's prison.
These statistics represent only a fraction of the problem. Police spokespersons have set the number of women brought into the country to work in the sex industry at 2,000-3,000 annually, the number of brothels at 250, Rozen said.
"It's Misha that knows Sasha that knows Vladimir," added Levenkron, noting the economic incentive to be a pimp or work with one. "It's easier being a trafficker than being a plumber."
One day she got a phone call from a rape crisis center where a woman pleaded to be arrested and deported.
This young Moldovian had twice tried to escape her pimp and at 18, was burned out on prostitution and just wanted to go home.
"She's so young and sweet," reflected Levenkron. "She came to Israel to be a waitress."
A year ago this month, Israel passed the Law Against Trafficking Women. Before that time, other laws existed against soliciting, pimping, and running brothels.
Yet hotline staff point out that few pimps involved in trafficking ever face a judge, with the majority of prostitutes deported without ever facing a trial that might involve their testimony against their pimps. Out of 459 women deported in 1998, only 35 cases went to trial; out of 253 in 1999, a scant five ended up in the courtroom.
Judicial indifference is compounded by police complicity, Levenkron argued.
The 18-year-old Moldovian, it turned out, had at one point in her misadventures, found herself in a Tel Aviv police station where some of the officers, who were her clients, recognized her and moved to call her pimp.
Overhearing their plans, the woman fled and moved in with a client-turned-boyfriend.
But somehow the pimp found her again, threatened the boyfriend. The young woman, with no place to go, went back to the brothel. Now the case hangs in the courts, where Levenkron has faint hopes for a positive outcome.
The police role in such trafficking ranges from casual to highly serious, she alleged.
"There are police who just come as clients, those who get special discounts because of their good relationships with the owner of the place and those that inform the owner about police operations," explained Levenkron.
One young Beersheva prostitute told the attorney she was forced to work seven days a week unless a police raid was expected.
Widespread fear of violence from pimps has muted the public outcry, say hotline staff. When Levenkron filed a suit on behalf of a Beersheva-based woman, a 20-year-old Moldovian who had survived six pimps and multiple rapes, several of the lawyer's friends came to her home to bid her a final farewell, in anticipation of her imminent death, she said.
INTERNATIONAL PROBLEM
Worldwide, trafficking in persons for domestic service, forced labor, and prostitution ranks third after drugs and guns among the activities of international crime, according to a congressional service report released May 10, 2000. For comparison, about 50,000 people are brought to the United States annually, the report stated.
The rise in trafficking seen over the 1990s was fueled by feeble economies in source countries, such as the former Soviet Union and Southeast Asia, along with weak penalties for traffickers, said a government official familiar with these issues.
Last October, the United States passed its own law addressing this problem, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, which calls on the State Department to report annually on the scope of trafficking in various countries and measures taken to combat it. The report was due for release on June 1, but its publication has been delayed.
In Israel today, official policy on trafficking is to arrest and deport foreign sex workers. The women are held for an average of 30 days under crowded and sometimes harsh conditions, longer if they testify in court against their pimps, according to hotline data.
Rozen and Levenkron take issue with this approach. "Deporting women doesn't make things better," said Levenkron. "I'm tired of shouting this all over Israel so I've come here [to the United States] to shout about it."
Rozen contends that a one-year work permit in specified fields such as home health care or child care, before their return home, would put the former prostitutes in a stronger position to take care of themselves.
Gruesome albeit unsubstantiated stories abound, she says, about revenge attacks on returning women and their families by the original trafficker in the home country.
A nest egg from a year's legitimate work, Rozen suggests, would allow victims to re-establish themselves in a new community and stay out of the clutches of traffickers in the future.
Meanwhile, Levenkron is seeking professional back-up in her job representing the victims of trafficking.
"I am the [hotline] legal department," laments Levenkron. "We need lawyers and we need public awareness."
A-G calls for crackdown on trafficking in
women
By Marion Marrache
The Jerusalem Post - August, 01 2001
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/08/01/News/News.31632.html
NEVEH ILAN (August 1) - Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein yesterday called for a crackdown on trafficking in women, charging that law enforcement officials are not doing their job.
"We have to fight this phenomenon morally, socially, and legally... to aspire to uproot this phenomenon," Rubinstein said.
Rubinstein spoke at a conference held yesterday at Neveh Ilan on trafficking in women for prostitution. Also speaking at the conference, chaired by Internal Security Ministry adviser Hagai Herzl, were Internal Security Minister Uzi Landau, Deputy Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra, Insp.-Gen. Shlomo Aharonishky, and Labor MK Yael Dayan.
Police investigations head Cmdr. Moshe Mizrahi said 3,000 trafficked prostitutes are currently in Israel and that numbers are on the rise. Insp.-Gen. Shlomo Aharonishky said that seven women were caught last night trying to enter Israel from Egypt.
Mizrahi expressed concern about how to protect women who decide to testify against their pimps. If they are repatriated, those who imported them will be able to find them; additionally, many are supporting children in their home countries whom they fear may be harmed. So far 31 women have agreed to testify and are receiving a monthly stipend of NIS 6,000.
Mizrahi called for a "serious operation" that would extend to the women's countries of origin.
Some two-thirds of the women brought here end up virtual captives and are physically and mentally mistreated. One-third eventually manage to get work in more established brothels where they only work 12 hours a day but still must foot the bill for their medical expenses.
Mizrahi said that 146 files involving brothels have been opened, and 23 women have appeared in court.
Meretz MK Zahava Gal-On called for the issue to be dealt with as soon as possible. Interior Ministry Director-General Mordechai Mordechai said he is appalled that this is happening in Israel, and that it is connected to the absence of proper regulations concerning foreign workers, who are often treated as slaves.
Seventy-five percent of the women who come from Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia understand that they will be working as prostitutes. The rest think they will be working as masseuses or in hotels. None, however, expect such mistreatment. They enter the country with false documents provided by the traffickers, which are then taken from them, and are kept virtual captives, and work 16 to 18 hours a day servicing between four and 25 clients. In addition, they are often sold to other pimps.
Tel Aviv District Attorney Miriam Rosenthal decried the lack of infrastructure that let the women back onto the street after coming to the police for help. Some of them manage to come to the police for help. "It's as if we didn't want to touch it."
Organization for Foreign Workers' Rights legal adviser Naomi Levenkron said that although police do spot checks for documents at apartments where the women are held, they often overlook false papers and never ask the women whether they want to be there.
Dep.-Cmdr. Avi Davidovitch, head of an inter-ministerial team established at Rubinstein's recommendation, mentioned the women's social-psychological plight. He said that few complaints were filed against pimps, whereas the number of trafficked women was high, and that many women either refuse to complain or retract their statements to police later in court. He called the situation "a war against Amalek without guns." Davidovitch added that thanks largely to Levenkron's work, every woman who does come forward is provided with a lawyer at the state's expense.
Prof. Julie Cwikel of Ben-Gurion University's Center for Women's Health Studies and Promotion supported "bringing some focus on occupational hazards and funding." She said that the women should be given more help than just AIDS testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. The women interviewed for Cwikel's study (as reported in yesterday's paper, "BGU publishes first study of local prostitutes") were those who "work in organized places. We cannot interview women held against their will. If the situation according to our study doesn't sound 'all that bad,' it's because we have looked at a small group in much better conditions."
(Itim contributed to this report.)
Israeli, int'l police crack down on child
pornography
By The Associated Press - November, 28 2001
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/11/28/LatestNews/LatestNews.38957.html
LONDON - Israeli police joined forces from 18 other nations today in an international crackdown on child pornography.
Police arrested seven people in a series of raids across Britain this morning as part of the international operation.
Police in 19 countries carried out 130 arrest and search warrants as part of the operation, code-named Landmark, the National Crime Service said. The operation targeted people who downloaded and distributed child pornography from the Internet.
British police made the raids after a 10-month operation in which they sifted through data from Internet newsgroups specializing in explicit images of children.
Nine forces in England and Scotland carried out 10 raids, arresting seven and seizing computers and software.
Police in 18 other countries - Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey and the United States - also executed search and arrest warrants, acting on information supplied by Interpol.
By Marion Marrache
Jerusalem Post - December, 02 2001
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/12/02/Features/Features.39142.html
(December 5) - Although new laws are in the works to stem the white-slavery trade into Israel, Marion Marrache explains why the authorities must do more to treat the prostitutes as victims rather than criminals
"Woman's flesh for sale, woman's flesh for sale," yells a man in front of the Hamashbir department store in downtown Jerusalem, offering up to passers-by the young woman standing next to him.
Although trafficking in women is very much a reality in Israel, this scene was a protest staged two weeks ago by the Jerusalem Women's Center as part of the International Day of Protest Against Violence Against Women.
"Instead of just protesting rape and domestic violence as we do every other year, we could not ignore the terrible issue of thousands of women being trafficked annually into this country to be used as prostitutes," says Adi Kunstman, coordinator of activities at the center, adding "Trafficking is modern slavery."
Local organizations dealing with the issue, such as the Hotline for Migrant Workers and the Awareness Center, believe that some 3,000 women are smuggled into the country every year for the purpose of prostitution. The majority of these women are from Moldavia, Russia and the Ukraine. They are approached in their countries of origin - where they earn $20 to $30 a month - with the promise of employment which will bring in a magical monthly $1,000.
According to a report issued by the International Abolitionist Federation, an estimated one-fourth of these women are unaware that they will be working in the sex trade, believing instead they will be employed as waitresses, cooks, au pairs, models or masseuses. None are prepared for what they eventually encounter. Most suffer beatings and repeated rape. The women are viewed and bought at pimping auctions - during which they are forced to undress - at prices ranging from $4,000 to $10,000.
According to attorney Nomi Levenkron of the Migrant Hotline, those who fetch the lower prices end up working in the slum area around Tel Aviv's old central bus station. Their passports are taken from them, and they are often kept locked up in apartments with barred windows. This was the case with the four prostitutes who were trapped and burnt to death when a religious fanatic torched a Tel Aviv brothel in August, 2000.
That incident briefly raised public awareness of the issue, and sparked calls for the authorities to start treating the problem seriously. But it is only in the past month that two bills that might alleviate the situation began to make headway in the Knesset.
Last week, a private member's bill entitling women who were sold into prostitution to public legal aid, passed its preliminary reading in the Knesset. Meretz MK Zahava Gal-On, sponsor of the bill and head of the parliamentary commission of inquiry into trafficking in women, notes that these women, when arrested, usually find themselves represented by their pimps' attorneys, an obvious clash of interests that goes against the principle of fair representation.
Two weeks ago the Knesset passed, in its preliminary reading, a bill that mandates a four-year minimum sentence for traders in women. Currently, there is a 16-year maximum sentence, but no minimum jail time, and many white slavers end up getting off with relatively light sentences.
"Israel has become a convenient center for pimps who trade in women," says Gal-On, who also proposed this bill. "It is modern-day slave trading, and the sentences for the pimps are not harsh enough, as judges still do not take this matter seriously enough. The courts give the criminals ridiculous sentences, rendering the current law meaningless. At the worst, the pimps spend a couple of years in jail, but they make a fortune. But from now on, criminals will know that you cannot trade in women and get off lightly."
AN ILLUMINATED sign reading "Palace Club" flashes outside a seedy brothel in south Tel Aviv. A group of journalists joining Gal-On's committee on a recent fact-finding mission, head down a few flights of dark stone stairs to the reception area where three young women sit huddled in a corner waiting for clients. Beside them stands their portly pimp dabbing the sweat from his forehead with a large silk handkerchief.
There are approximately 250 such brothels in Tel Aviv, an increase of 100 since last year. This is by far the largest number of brothels in the country; in other parts of the country trafficking exists, but it is less common and there is far less awareness of the problem. Some of the women live in brothels, others have a room elsewhere.
If business is good, a shift can last from 10 a.m. to 3 a.m. They are paid at the end of the month after expenses and "fines" have been deducted - prostitutes can be fined by their pimps for almost anything. And this is only once the girls have paid back their purchase price, during which time they are extraordinarily lucky if those who are pimping for them give them a daily allowance of NIS 20 for cigarettes.
Often, by the time they have finished buying themselves out of their slavery, they have been resold and must begin again. These women are told so often that they are the property of their pimps that they do not even stop to think whether or not they have to have sex with them as well. Although clients generally have to use protection, the pimps usually don't. Gal-On says one pimp told her his women make NIS 120 for a half-hour, "NIS 100 for me, NIS 20 for them." Many brothels also have a kitty into which the girls have to put NIS 30 to 50 per client in order to cover the brothel's tax bill (declared income is credited to "massages").
These women are often lured into prostitution in their native countries by misleading job advertisements in the papers. They often have very young children who they have left behind with their families.
"Some have artistic careers, others are academics who want to make some money to pay for their studies," explains Levenkron. "Those who have children generally have not been part of the work force yet because they have married young."
Many of the women travel from Moscow to Sharm e-Sheikh, and then are taken to the Israeli border. They are met by there by Beduin guides, who smuggle them across the border and deliver them to an agent acting on behalf of procurers.
They are also provided with false documentation, needed for those times when the police raid brothels, check the womens' identification papers and ask to see if they have valid visas. But according to the prostitutes, they rarely enquire whether they are being held against their will. In any case, the women admit, they are usually too frightened to answer truthfully.
Although prostitution itself is not a crime in Israel, such groups as the Migrant Hotline and the Awareness Center accuse the authorities of treating the trafficked women as criminals, instead of victims, interested simply in deporting them - as has been the case with more than 1,000 such women in the past three years. These organizations also accuse law enforcement of generally ignoring the crimes of pimps and traffickers, even though they "buy, sell, rape and torture women," because they sometimes cooperate with the police by providing information about other criminal activities.
There have also been at least a half-dozen cases of sex trafficking involving policemen as suspects, and one policeman was charged with managing a brothel. In four cases, policemen informed the pimps of expected raids on their premises, and in one instance a policeman was accused of selling a woman to another pimp following her arrest.
One prostitute, Sonya (not her real name), says she went to a police station and asked to be arrested because she had just ran away from the brothel where she was held against her will. The policemen turned her away, and as she left she heard them saying (in Hebrew) they were going to call her pimp.
ONE OFFICER who does care is Tel Aviv Police Superintendent Pini Aviram, who heads a special investigative team dealing with the trafficking issue. But Aviram complains that he does not have anywhere near the manpower need for the job.
"My team consists of only five Russian speakers," he says, "We need people who can speak to the women in their own language, and interview them adequately."
This adequate interviewing is actually taking place, but unfortunately not until the women have already found their way into jail. They are held, usually at the Neveh Tirza prison but alternatively at Abu Kabir, Kishon, Negev or others, for weeks and sometimes for months, awaiting deportation. Levenkron or other volunteers from Migrant Hotline visit Neveh Tirza every Sunday taking a translator and additional student volunteers with them. Hotline is the only non-governmental organization which has been allowed access to the prisons, and they bring the women phone cards and clothing.
"One women sticks in my mind," says Levenkron; "She wore one green satin pyjama for three weeks straight, until we were able to bring her clothes."
Now, thanks to Neveh Tirza warden Debi Sagi, Hotline has better and easier access to the women. "Debi doesn't think they should be in prison," says Levenkron, "but as long as they are she wants to make life as easy as she can for them."
In general, the prostitutes are housed separately from the hardened criminals, but that is not always possible due to space restrictions. Levenkron worries about this because of the danger of the women being influenced to take drugs by their cellmates. Eastern European prostitutes, unlike their Israeli counterparts do not generally take drugs. In fact, Levenkron has only come across one such case among all the women she has met and whose interviews she has looked over.
Another difference between foreign and Israeli prostitutes is that the latter get to keep a larger percentage of the takings. Sadly, says Levenkron, one girl's ambition was to "become an Israeli prostitute."
When asked whether they had tried to run away - and if not why not - many of the women explain that they are afraid for the safety of their families back home. Some have tried to escape, and were later caught and beaten. One women presently housed at a hostel waiting to testify against her pimp, told the Hotline that a man who had befriended her was supposed to meet to help her escape but when she arrived at the prearranged meeting point, her pimp turned up instead. She began to scream and the police came and took her into custody.
In many cases when a woman is arrested, her pimp will pay an NIS 30,000 bail pending her deportation, so that she can go back to work. Thus, says Levenkron, "these women, who were raped, trafficked and exploited before their arrests, were in fact sold once more, this time by the state itself."
Police Deputy-Commander Avi Davidovitch, head of an inter-ministerial team dealing with the trafficking issue established at Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein's recommendation, says that although the number of trafficked women is growing alarmingly high, few complaints are filed against pimps, and many women either refuse to complain or later retract earlier statements they have made to the police out of fear of reprisals.
Police investigations head Cmdr. Moshe Mizrahi also expresses concern about how to protect women who decide to testify against their pimps. If they are simply repatriated, those who imported them will be able to find them; additionally, many are supporting children in their home countries whom they fear may be harmed. Mizrahi calls for a "serious international operation" that would extend to the women's countries of origin.
For example, in some countries of the Former Soviet Union, a poster campaign has sprung up and women are able to read on buses and other public places about the dangers of falling for the offer of a well-paying job abroad. But, Mizrahi insists, much more still needs to be done.
At least now, thanks to the Hotline's intervention, every woman who does come forward is provided with some assistance at the state's expense. This came about after four women filed a petition through the Hotline requesting the court instruct the police to seriously investigate their complaints against their procurers. The women stated they would be ready to testify against the pimps in court, provided they did not have to spend the intervening months in jail until called upon to give evidence at the trial. As a result of the petition, the police questioned the girls, and those who agreed to testify were provided with a safe place to stay and living expenses until the time of their testimony.
But Hotline insists that even this aid (said by police to cost NIS 6,000 a month per woman, a sum with which Hotline disagrees) is inadequate, especially when it comes to medical expenses. Many of the women come out of the brothels with serious health problems; one 21-year-old former prostitute is now unable to have children because of untreated gynecological problems. According to Shuki Baleli, Vice Squad Chief for the Tel Aviv District, they rarely even go to a doctor unless they are in pain. "If they die, no one will even know who they are," he adds.
Even when under police protection, almost every medical incident needs to be appealed separately by Hotline on behalf of the women. The humanitarian group Doctors for Human Rights treats these women for free or for nominal sums in the NIS 30 to 50 range, but serious health problems sometimes require the women to seek other sources of treatment.
So far, despite the provision providing them with a place to stay outside of prison, only a few dozen of the trafficked women have agreed to testify against their pimps. What they need, says Levenkron, "is a reason to come forward and to give evidence against these criminals."
She recommends that instead of threatening these women with deportation, they be given work or student visas for a specified amount of time in order to make the ordeal worth their while.
"Legalization of their status is the only real option," she says, an issue that applies to all foreign workers in this country. "If there will be further laws written," adds Levenkron, "they should insure that these victims get effective legal representation, medical treatment and a proper place from them to stay."
by Shula Kopf
The Jerusalem Post - June 21, 2002
HIGHLIGHT:
Rape, beatings and humiliation are daily reality for the thousands of women being sold into prostitution here. Three boxes at end of text.
The girls are young, beautiful and desperate. Their stories are heartbreaking.Listen to Marina, 19, from Moldavia."The day after I arrived in Israel, men began arriving in the apartment. They wore a lot of gold jewelry, they all had cellular phones and they smoked a lot. They were fat and scary. They looked like criminals to me. We had to get undressed and turn around for their inspection. They looked us over to see if we had scars or stretch marks. I felt like the African people who were sold as slaves 200 years ago. I felt like an animal."
There are self-inflicted slash marks on Marina's forearms. The 19-year-old cut herself with a knife in agitated moments of self-loathing during her seven-month stint as a Tel Aviv call girl.
Tanya, 20, from Russia:
"The first day they explained the rules to me. I must smile all the time and I must sit upright on the sofa in the reception room. I must not laugh or talk with the other girls. In the lobby the owner could see everything that was going on through cameras. But he was a good owner. He never beat me."
In the last 10 years, nearly 10,000 women have been smuggled into Israel and sold to brothels, grist for the mill of the lucrative sex trade estimated to make $ 450 million profit a year. Trafficking in people is the fastest growing area of international organized crime, preying on women and children made vulnerable by poverty and despair. According to a CIA report, one to two million people are trafficked each year worldwide, 50,000 into the US. The average age of entry into prostitution is 14. Most are recruited or forced.
The profits are staggering and trafficking is now considered the third largest source of profits for organized crime, behind drugs and guns, generating billions of dollars annually. Generally the flow is from Third World countries to the industrialized nations.
"It comes down to the point that men with money can buy the bodies of weak, poverty-stricken, desperate women," says Nissan Ben-Ami of the Awareness Institute, a non- profit Israeli organization which fights trafficking. "Society enables men to purchase sex just like one buys a loaf of bread."
Until recently, Israel has been a comfortable place for traffickers to do business. According to police, a brothel owner can profit anywhere from $ 50,000-$ 100,000 a year per woman, and he may have from 10 to 30 working for him. The women generally get only NIS 20 per customer, after they pay off their "debt" to the pimp.
In the last two years, Israel took the brunt of a scathing Amnesty International report and was placed on a US State Department's black list, a double punch which inaugurated the fight against trafficking.
"The issue of trafficking became politically correct," says Nomi Levenkron, attorney for the Hotline for Migrant Workers.
Just this month, due to its increased efforts, Israel was taken off the US State Department's list of worst offenders.
"Very little has changed in reality," says Levenkron. "The government's response continues to be the deportation of the women. There is no safe house for victims who want to escape their pimps. The court sentences are too lenient and there are too many plea bargaining deals."
Nonchalant politicians and an apathetic public ignore the cries of alarm about modern-day slavery raised by activists such as Levenkron.
"Israel started a bit late with this battle but is taking big steps in the right direction," says activist Leah Gruenpeter Gold of the Awareness Institute, which, together with the migrant workers' hotline, publishes an annual report it submits to the UN. "When the phenomenon began about a decade ago, with the last wave of Russian immigration, Israel wasn't ready. It all came as a surprise."
In fact, until two years ago there was no reference to trafficking in the penal code. Labor MK Yael Dayan sponsored an amendment in July 2000 which set a maximum 16- year sentence for the selling or buying of people.
At about the same time, the Amnesty report provided the impetus for the creation of a parliamentary inquiry committee headed by Zehava Gal-On of Meretz.
Gal-On's committee gained a shot in the arm eight months later when the US State Department released its report listing Israel among 23 nations which do not take the minimum measures to halt the trafficking of people across their borders. Israel's peers on this blacklist were Gabon, Sudan, Qatar and Bahrein, not exactly the company Israel aspires to keep. In addition, the report threatened to cut off US aid to countries that do not take steps to improve.
'It amazed us that the state was punishing the women by arresting and deporting them for illegal stay in Israel and letting the pimps go," says Gal-On.
In 2000, nearly 400 Eastern European prostitutes were arrested in police raids on brothels, jailed in Neve Tirzah women's prison, and then deported.
"The government likes to fold them, pack them and ship them," says Levenkron.
To date, Gal-On's committee has held 21 meetings, heard testimonies from numerous expert witnesses and proposed 10 changes to the law, of which six have received wide support from all parties.
"The trafficking of women is modern slavery and I am not willing to have it take place in Israel," says Gal-On. "Some people say that these women knew they were going to work in prostitution before they came here. That is irrelevant. They are victims whose basic human rights have been violated. They certainly didn't imagine the conditions they would meet here: the rapes, the violence, the humiliation and their sale from pimp to pimp."
Olga, 19, from Russia:
"We were never allowed out. The door was thick and there were bars on the windows. We were always guarded. Sasha would accompany us to the client's hotel and returned us immediately to the brothel. I knew I was coming here to work in prostitution, but I didn't know that prostitution means being closed up in a jail where 30 clients a day visit me without me being asked if I am willing or not. I didn't know I would have to work hours that never end and that I would always have to be ready, because maybe a client wants me at 10 in the morning when I went to sleep only at seven."
Gal-On, who heard testimony from young girls like Olga, has declared an all-out war against trafficking with several weapons in her arsenal:
An amendment to the penal code to require a four- year mandatory sentence for trafficking.
A proposal to allow the government to confiscate the traffickers' profits and property.
A witness protection bill to encourage victims to testify.
The establishment of a special government task force to lead the charge.
"Until now Israel has been an easy and comfortable place for the pimps," says Gal-On. "We have to get the pimps where it hurts - in their pocketbooks - to confiscate all their ill-gotten profits, as is done in drug cases. We're talking about an industry that according to some estimates, makes $ 450 million to $ 1 billion profit a year. They must be made to understand that they can't sell women's bodies and get away with it."
But get away with it they have."Of all the cases we have investigated, made arrests and handed over to the prosecution, never once have we been called upon to testify," says Pini Aviram, superintendent in the Tel Aviv police and co-head of a special investigating team of Russian-speaking officers. The cases rarely come to trial, and end in plea bargains.
"The deals are ludicrous," says the burly police officer, his voice edged with anger. "If we get them on three counts of trafficking, that is only the tip of the iceberg. And for that they get 18 months when the maximum sentence is 16 years on each charge. It infuriates me. I think that anything less than 10 years is a light sentence for these people. This is a plague that must be rooted out."
Aviram says, with no small measure of cynicism, that he has arrested second-time offenders who were back in business after completing their short jail term. However, he feels encouraged by a recent ruling by a Tel Aviv District Court judge who refused to approve a plea bargain and, instead, sentenced the pimp to three years in jail, two years probation and a NIS 10,000 fine.
According to Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit, over the last year 42 traffickers have been charged and 28 have been convicted with sentences ranging from two to 12 years.
"We must root out this contemptible and ugly phenomenon not just because of the Amnesty report, but because we are the State of Israel and something like this should not be allowed to exist here," Sheetrit said at a recent Knesset hearing.
His office has given prosecutors new instructions to hold traffickers in jail until their trial is over and to ask the court for financial compensation for the victims.
"If the pimp sits in jail for four years but his millions wait for him when he gets out, that is not enough of a deterrent," says Eli Kaplan, co-head of the special Tel Aviv police unit. "We need to get them where it hurts, in their pockets, and confiscate all their money and use it to benefit some of these girls, so that they don't go back to Moldavia to pick potatoes and freeze in the winter. If they can get some compensation, it will encourage them to testify."
About 60 percent of all arrests in the country come from the Tel Aviv unit, including the well-publicized recent arrest of Mark Gaiman who, according to police, ran a chain of brothels and a well-oiled network for recruiting and smuggling girls from Moldavia and the Ukraine. The unit has been cut back from 14 to seven officers as police have been assigned other positions due to the security situation.
Almost all the women come from the former Soviet Union where the high rate of unemployment and low pay make them vulnerable to the lure of procurers. In Moldavia, for example, 55% of the population live under the poverty line and the GNP per person is $ 400.
Christina, 21:
"In Moldavia, a woman simply must work somewhere so that her child and her husband, who is capable of wasting a month's salary on alcohol, will not starve to death. A salary of $ 35 a month is barely enough to survive. So the girl, out of stupidity or naivete, goes abroad with the hope of being a nanny, but arrives to a closed place where she must pleasure clients for 20 to 30 shekels."
Today, after Israel has tightened control at the airport, the women are smuggled through Egypt by Beduins, at a rate of about 30 to 40 a week, according to police.
Upon their arrival, the women are put up for sale, sometimes at a public auction where they are exhibited in front of a large crowd of pimps and sold to the highest bidder.
"The public auctions are just like the slave trade that you see in the movies," says Aviram. "They check their teeth and look to see if they have scars. The price is set by their looks. It's a slave market in the most disgusting way. The pimps look at them as merchandise. 'You belong to me. I bought you,' they tell the girls. I heard one of the girls say, 'When I lived in Moldavia I used to take my dog out twice a day to the yard to relieve himself. Here they held me locked up. I needed permission to go to the bathroom, to eat. My dog had it better.'"
According to a report by the Hotline for Migrant Workers submitted to the UN Commission on Human Rights, "The woman's intimate parts are often examined in order to appraise the value of the 'merchandise.' The price of a woman may vary from $ 4,000 to $ 10,000 depending on age and looks. The quality of a woman's false documents is also a factor in estimating her price."
In the court case of the State of Israel vs Reuven Rivai, the judge describes the sale of a woman named Eliona as follows: "A meeting was set for the following day at the McDonald's restaurant at the Gan Shmuel intersection... negotiations were held regarding the sale of Eliona for the purpose of prostitution. At the end of the negotiations, Eliona was taken to the men's room, stripped naked and examined by the buyer. It was agreed that she would be sold for $ 6,000... Eliona's examination can only be compared to the examination of cattle in the market."
After the sale to one of the country's 700 brothels, the women are told they will have to "pay their debt" to the pimps before they start earning any money - only about NIS 20 of the NIS 200 paid by the customers. They are fined for numerous "infractions": not smiling at clients, looking out the window or drinking a glass of wine without permission. The working hours are unbearable - 15 to 17 a day, and the women get few, if any, days off. Levenkron tells the story of one girl who was forced to spend her 21st birthday servicing 37 clients.
"I worked the morning shift in the brothel," one victim told the police. "The morning shift starts at 10 a.m. and ends at 3 a.m. ... the owner would sleep with any girl he wanted. We did not have the right to refuse."
According to police, often the pimp sells the woman to another brothel as soon as she has worked off her "debt" and the cycle of exploitation begins again.
"They keep rotating the girls among the brothels so the regular customers won't get bored," says Aviram.
"We have some girls who run away and come to us with nothing but a nylon bag with a couple of pairs of underwear," says Kaplan. "This is definitely modern slavery. In the end, after being abused, they end up with nothing."
Svetlana, 22, from the Ukraine.
"One day Natasha managed to escape. We don't know how, but we woke up in the morning and she wasn't there. We were so happy, not only because it infuriated the owner. He went wild. But also because we hoped, that if she succeeded, then one day we could succeed as well. That was the only day that I can remember since I got to Israel that I stopped feeling fear and despair and began to feel some hope."
A long-term solution to the problem, according to some Israeli activists, is nothing less than a restructuring of society. They point to Sweden where women have almost half the political power and, as a result, prostitution has been reduced by 60 percent in the last few decades.
"Prostitution is rooted in the structure of society and in the inequality between men and women," says Gold of the Awareness Institute. "To say that in 100 years the phenomenon will disappear, just as did African slavery, might be too optimistic. But in order to begin making the change we must not institutionalize or legitimize prostitution."
Gali (not her real name), an Israeli prostitute with a going rate of NIS 50, has her own opinions on this and other subjects. Gali has staked her spot behind the Mandarin Hotel in Tel Aviv, a dusty lot that serves as daytime parking for beach-goers but transforms at night into an outdoor brothel. Gali has fought off all challengers to her spot, especially younger and prettier prostitutes, resorting to violence when cursing and tough words don't scare them off.
"You have to be strong here or else you get trampled," she says in a husky voice.
It's a Thursday night and already the cars, headlights piercing the dark, circle Gali and her colleagues like a column of ants around breadcrumbs.
"This is pretty good traffic despite the bad economy," she observes and flicks the blonde hair of her wig with manicured fingers.
Gali is an intelligent, articulate woman who seems as if she could easily work as a store manager or run an office. She says that as bad as things are for her and the other Israeli prostitutes, there is nothing worse than the hell experienced by the young Eastern European girls smuggled into the country by traffickers.
"What the pimps do to them is like cutting into live meat," she says. "We've had a few of the girls who managed to run away from the pimps. They went through hell, rape, beatings and humiliation. They didn't know the language and didn't even know where they were. Their passports were taken away. They told us they were afraid to complain. There is nothing worse than for a woman to be forced into prostitution. At least I work for myself and not for some pimp," she says.
Gali has the social equation neatly summed up: "As long as there are men and as long as there are desperate, hungry women, there will be prostitution."
(Box 1) Physical abuse, psychological trauma
Prostitution is hazardous to mental health, even more so than being a combat soldier, according to a recent American study which found that prostitutes had a higher rate of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), than American Vietnam veterans.
"It's a devastating experience. They are beaten, robbed, raped and degraded and this has a cumulative effect on their self-esteem and mental health," says Eli Somer, psychology professor at the University of Haifa's School of Social Work.
Somer cites studies that indicate prostitutes are raped on average eight to 10 times a year and have a 75 percent rate of at least one suicide attempt. The vast majority, some studies indicate 90 percent, were sexually molested as children.
"How can anyone even think of legalizing something that is so damaging?" he asks.
Philosophically, Somer views prostitution as a shameful thread woven into the fabric of a male-dominated society.
"This is another illustration of how men exploit women's economic poverty," he says. "All the bad things assigned to us men are reflected in prostitution."
He pauses and adds: "I get embarrassed sometimes for being a man."
Nomi Levenkron, of the Hotline for Migrant Workers, knows of at least two women who have had mental breakdowns and had to be hospitalized.
Once the women are able to extricate themselves from the clutches of the traffickers and return home, their nightmare is not over.
Researchers for the International Organization for Migration published a report last year stating that 92 percent of victims had major problems returning to normal life. They experienced physical and mental health problems, a divorce rate three times higher than the average and numerous suicides or suicide attempts. They are threatened by traffickers to keep silent, and some are forced to join the trafficking networks to recruit new victims.
(Box 2) An old (Jewish) profession
Jews have been active in "white slavery" (as trafficking was known) beginning in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe. The poverty, discrimination, persecution and mass migrations proved to be fertile ground for brothel keeping and procuring, according to Nissan Ben-Ami of the Awareness Institute. A third of the women in the trade were Jewish and Jews organized an elaborate crime network to procure and transport women to Argentina, South Africa and England, he says.
According to Yale University historian Edward Bristow, in 1892, 22 Jewish traffickers in Lemberg (Lvov) in the Ukraine were convicted of procuring women for Turkish brothels. Jewish traffickers populated whole streets in Czernowitz. Refugees from Russian pogroms established the first brothels in Saloniki. In Warsaw, Jewish bundists were so outraged by the presence of Jewish brothel-keepers, that in 1905 they demolished 40 brothels. Eight people were killed and 100 injured in the riot.
In Buenos Aires, the powerful fraternity of Jewish pimps and procurers was known as the Zwi Migdal Society. They had their own synagogue and burial ground. Surveying the ground at the cemetery, the author Stefan Zweig remarked, "So much dirt, how much Jewish dirt. Where can I get the energy to describe this?"
In his book, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, Bristow chronicles the efforts of voluntary Jewish organizations to rescue Jewish victims from brothels and to fight the traffickers. It is largely due to Jewish efforts that legislation against procuring and juvenile prostitution was passed in Britain and South Africa.
Bristow cites a letter written in 1902 by American Rabbi Stephen Wise to a London rabbi, president of the gentleman's club of the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women.
"According to the statement of my informant, a large number of Jewish women in Manila are to be found in the ranks of prostitution. He thinks that at one time the number reached 200, but that now the number is less than 100, thanks to measures of the American government. These women are mainly of Galician, Russian or Rumanian birth. It is almost too shocking to put to paper, but according to Mr. Rubinstein, the statement of a man that he is a Jew is followed invariably by the question 'Have you any nice women to sell?' Saddest of all is the fact that these women have not chosen a life of shame of their own free will, but have for the most part been inveigled under promises or pretense of marriage These victims of deceit and treachery, though leading dissolute lives, are conscious of their shame, are not drunken and hilarious and frequently weep over their degradation."
(Box 3) Luckier ladies 'sold' to cops
Tel Aviv police ran a sting operation on May 12, with officers posing as pimps "purchasing" three Moldavian girls smuggled by Beduins over the Egyptian border.
"This is the first time we were able to get close to the smugglers working on both sides of the border," says Eli Kaplan, superintendent of the Tel Aviv Police Central Unit. The Beduin were armed and the police officers were not.
"So we gave them only part of the money, $ 10,000, and the rest we told them we would pay in Tel Aviv. When one of the Beduin arrived to get the money, we arrested him," says Kaplan. The police have not yet arrested the other two, nor recovered the $ 10,000 of taxpayers' money. According to police, the Beduin, Saliman Abu-Shalibi, 26, of the al-Azma tribe, has been charged with smuggling, selling and raping the women.
The girls "purchased" by the police told a harrowing tale. They were flown into Egypt and taken by Beduin into the desert.
"We spent three nights in the desert on the Egyptian side. The first group of Beduin treated us OK. They gave us food and cigarettes and laughed with us. They tried to rape us, but we threatened to tell the bosses in Israel on them," says Olla, 20.
A rival gang of Beduin kidnapped the girls at gunpoint.
"It was difficult and dangerous. They forced us to walk on foot and climb hills. It was difficult to breathe and my heart pounded. We had to climb big boulders. We hid when we saw headlights of cars. We moved at night. To cross the border, we started at around 7 at night and we were in Israel at 6 in the morning."
That is when their real ordeal began.
"We were put in a ruined house in the middle of the desert and were left there the entire day without food or water. There were signs left by women who had been there before us. We wanted to run away, but we didn't know where to go."
Christina, 20, picks up the story.
"At night the Beduin arrived with a car. We drove around in the desert. He was high on drugs. Suddenly he stopped the car, opened the door where I was sitting. He shouted at me to get out. I didn't want to. He was shouting at me. He was drugged out, so I was afraid. I got out and he told me to get undressed. I told him I was in the middle of my period, but he didn't understand."
At this point, Olla, who had worked previously as a call girl, got out of the car to protect Christina, who was innocent about such things. Christina, a petite girl with piercing blue eyes and a quiet demeanor, had been told in Moldavia that she would work in Israel as a waitress in a casino.
"He told me to get undressed. I refused," says Olla. "He said, 'all the time that you are with me, I am your owner and you will do what I tell you.' He threw me on the ground on my belly, stripped me, held my hands behind my back, and opened up my legs with his and that's it. He finished inside me. I told him I don't have contraception. He told me I will have a baby and he laughed.
"At 6 in the morning he returned us to the house and left us there all day with no food or water. Another night he brought two friends with him."
The girls consider themselves lucky to have been "sold" to the Tel Aviv police.
"We are helping the police by testifying so that this phenomenon will be wiped out," says Olla. "We are not animals and we are not slaves. We are people and not objects to be used."
Due to new regulations, the girls, who are in the country illegally, are not jailed but stay in a hostel paid for by the police until the time of the trial. Meanwhile they have found legitimate work.
"I am able to work in a respectable way," says Olla, who is tall, skinny, and dressed provocatively in tight- fitting black pants and high-heeled black shoes. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Her face is clean of make-up. Her brown eyes are deep set and sad. She plays nervously with a key chain during the interview. She has an air of hurt melancholy about her.
"When I was a little girl my dream was to be a mother and to give my children everything," she says.
This is Olla's second time in Israel. Previously, she worked in an escort service for about seven months before she was caught by police and deported. Upon her return to Moldavia she met the same poverty and hunger that drove her to prostitution in the first place.
Olla says she can't remember much about her first encounter with a client. She drank three glasses of whiskey to dull her senses.
"I felt hurt. Back in Moldavia I agreed to do this kind of work, but when I was confronted with the truth and understood what I needed to do, I felt disgusted." Olla says she had to work without pay until she returned her $ 5,000 purchase price to the owner of the escort service.
"Some of the clients were masochists, drug addicts and perverts. It was disgusting. I tried to ignore my thoughts because I had no choice."
The women say they would like nothing better than to be allowed to stay in Israel on temporary papers and to work cleaning houses.
"At first the pimp used us. And now the police will use us as witnesses and then kick us out. All we want is a chance to work in a normal job," says Olla.
GRAPHIC: 3 photos: Christina and Olla, two Moldavian prostitutes. Eli Kaplan, Tel Aviv police. Nissan Ben-Ami and Leah Gruenpeter Gold, the Awareness Institute. (Credit: Shula Kopf)
by Shalva Ben David
Aish Ha Torah - April 28, 2003
http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/middleeast/Young_Girls_at_Risk.asp
15,000 Jewish teenage girls, from impoverished or broken families, have run away from home and are currently living with Arab men. One woman is trying to do something about it.
Miriam Schwartz is worried about the future of the Jewish people. It's not the terrorist attacks. It's not the failed Oslo accords. Miriam Schwartz is afraid that many Jewish souls in the State of Israel are being swallowed up by the Arab population.
Her concerns are fueled by the astonishing statistic from a source in the Ministry of Labor and Welfare that 15,000 Jewish teenage girls, from impoverished or broken families, have run away from home and are currently living with Arab men. Mrs. Schwartz, a Jewish educator of over 20 years, is determined to fight this phenomenon by offering these teens the chance to build new lives.
In an interview, Mrs. Schwartz said that she came across this trend purely by accident. En route to deliver a lecture in Be'er Sheva, she picked up a 12-year-old girl hitchhiking at the exit from Jerusalem. During the course of their conversation, the young girl revealed that she was living with an Arab and had persuaded a friend of hers to move in with a friend of his. Mrs. Schwartz gave the young girl her phone number and was not surprised when the girl contacted her for help a few months later.
After some investigation, Mrs. Schwartz learned that Arab men frequently target girls from broken homes or impoverished families. "In many cases the first contact takes place at a local grocery store, where an Arab stock boy is working. At first he just offers the girl some candy or a small toy. The next day the girl, who has no such luxuries at home, comes back for another treat. Until now, the girl does not know that the man is actually an Arab -- he poses as a Jew. After several months, and many gifts, the Arab entices the girl to come and live with him. Initially, she lives in the house as a daughter of the household, but when she becomes an older teenager, she enters into a relationship with the man, and tragically bears Jewish children who are raised as Arabs."
According to Mrs. Schwartz, this situation is nothing less than a national emergency that calls for immediate action. "With 750,000 Israeli children living under the poverty line, many children are at risk."
She reported that while these girls are treated reasonably when they are still young, their status changes once they are older and have borne children. Then they are treated more like slaves, but by that time, the girls are too deeply entrenched in the household to leave.
Additionally, there is great potential for damage to Jewish demographics in Israel. While a child born of a Jewish mother and an Arab father is a Jew according to Torah law, s/he is an Arab according to Arab tradition. Unless these young women are persuaded to take their children and leave these Arab homes, this phenomenon will compound the increasing gap that exists between the Jewish and Arab population.
After learning more about this worrisome trend, Mrs. Schwartz formed the organization Yad B'Yad in order to bring these girls back into the Jewish fold. This is, in fact, a two-part battle: persuading the girls to leave their Arab household, and finding a totally new home for them, since their biological parents are absent, uninvolved or unable to raise them. As founder and director of Am Echad United, a grassroots organization that promotes Jewish unity, she was familiar with the route a non-profit cause must take, and lost no time in contacting potential donors in North America as well as Welfare Minister Rabbi Shlomo Benizri in order to raise funds.
Mrs. Schwartz's dream is to build an educational complex with dormitory facilities in order to house these girls and enable them to build new lives. However, dreams are accomplished in stages and her first step was to rent out two houses in the center of Israel and settle the first group of girls in gradually. Yad B'Yad assumes responsibility for the girls' basic, immediate needs - food, clothing, shelter - as well as secondary needs such as schooling and medical care. The local municipality provides psychologists and social workers who are in constant contact with each girl. A housemother will be living on the premises and Sherut Leumi (National Service) volunteers will soon join the staff as youth advisors. Additionally, Mrs. Schwartz teaches the girls about their Jewish heritage so that they will be motivated from within to raise a Jewish family.
However, Mrs. Schwartz distinguishes between Jewish heritage and Jewish law. "I'm against religious coercion. Girls who live in our shelter do not have to observe the mitzvot. On the other hand, basic ground rules must be observed. Drugs are absolutely forbidden at Yad B'Yad and the girls must attend some type of educational institution."
Yad B'Yad does not accept a girl if there is a warrant for her arrest, nor does it accept girls that are being forced there by an outside authority. "The girls at Yad B'Yad come willingly," Mrs. Schwartz notes. "They are motivated to start a new life."
Yad B'Yad also operates on the preventative level, as Mrs. Schwartz explains, "I visit hang-outs in Tel Aviv, Holon and Jerusalem at night and talk to girls at risk. I give them my phone number and tell them that they can call me at any time. We give lectures to mothers to raise awareness about the problem. We urge them to be mindful of their daughters' whereabouts at all times and caution against sending a young girl to the grocery store alone."
It's clear that there are many obstacles to overcome in a project such as this. The financial costs of building an entire complex alone are staggering. However, Mrs. Schwartz is undaunted and is proceeding in stages. "This is a war we cannot afford to lose," she says. "It is a fight for the Jewish future."
To learn more about Yad b'Yad, please visit http://www.yadbyad.net.
Victoria's, and Israel's, Ugly
Secret
Ina Friedman
Jerusalem Report -January 31, 2004
http://www.jrep.com/Israel/Article-55.html
Of the thousands of women brought to Israel each year to work as prostitutes, many are enslaved, beaten and raped by their pimps. Now, one of them is fighting back...
If you were to pass her on the street, there's nothing particular about Victoria that would catch your eye. She could be your daughter, your sister, or your wife. In fact, before her ordeal began, she was a law student in the small Republic of Moldova, and she still has hopes of resuming her studies there. It is only when she begins to speak - barely above a whisper, in grammatically tortured Hebrew picked up "on the job" - that you sense, even become infected by, the fear in her voice, the sadness in her eyes, the exhaustion broadcast by her very posture. And only when you hear her story do you understand that this intelligent, un-assuming 21-year-old - one of the millions of people around the world who have been trafficked as prostitutes this year (see box) - is a heroine, not of some abstract international struggle for human rights but of a very private struggle to rise above the status of victim and take charge of her life again.
Ironically, it was a similar impetus that led Victoria (who asks that her last name not be published) into the nightmare she has been living for the past 16 months. In mid-1999, when she ran out of funds to continue her studies and found that her family would not help her, she was lured by the offer of a job in Israel as a masseuse. The promised monthly salary was $1,000 (astronomical compared to the $30 a month she was earning in Moldova), and she was assured that she could return there whenever she chose.
Victoria's suspicion that something was awry arose at the last moment, when the "job recruiter" equipped her with a false passport to travel via Romania. But it was only after she arrived in Israel, in August 1999, that she learned the truth about her new "job" from the man who met her at the airport, took the passport from her, and drove her to a town in the Negev. And the truth was harrowing: The "recruiter," she was told, had sold her into prostitution and debt bondage - meaning that she would have to work off her purchase price ($6,500) before she could be released or even start earning a wage. She would also be required to have sex with her "owner" and his friends for free. The best she could expect for herself was tips from satisfied clients, which she soon discovered averaged $4 to $8 per john.
"We were locked in an apartment or under guard every time we moved from place to place," Victoria explains when asked why she didn't flee. "And even if I could get away, I had no passport, I had no money for a ticket to go back." Because she had entered Israel illegally, Victoria feared the law. She also had reason to suspect that local policemen were in cahoots with her "owners," because they were among the clients being "serviced" in one of the places in which she worked. ("They showed up in uniform," she relates, "with a squad car parked outside waiting for them.") But most of all she feared reprisal by her pimps. "They threatened that if I ran away, their people would track me down in Moldova and make sure I was punished."
AND SO, OVER THE COURSE OF 11 months, Victoria worked in various brothels, apartments and hotels in Beersheba and Tel Aviv from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week, "servicing" between 10 and 20 clients a day. Five times she was sold by one pimp to another, each new "owner" requiring her to work off her purchase price. Along the way, she was raped and sodomized by three of her "owners" and one's son, as well. When a brothel in which she was working was raided and she was taken to the police station, she produced the forged Israeli identity card given to her by her "owner" and claimed - as she had been instructed - that she had been in the country for three years. Seeing the identity card, the police asked no further questions, and Victoria was released back into slavery.
It was only on July 27, 2000, the second time she was arrested in a raid, that the police bothered to interrogate Victoria. "I showed them the forged identity card again, but this time they asked me detailed questions about my family - the family I supposedly had, according to the forged card - and I couldn't answer them. So although I was frightened, I told them the truth," she recalls.
Thus ended one ordeal and began another. As an illegal alien, Victoria was held for about a month in a local lock-up and then another two in the Neveh Tirzah Women's Prison in Ramlah, awaiting deportation, before she was discovered by the Hotline for Foreign Workers, a Tel Aviv NGO that focuses on the plight of illegal foreign workers. At first all she wanted was the Hotline's help in obtaining a proper travel document so that she could leave the country. But at some point Victoria also remembered that wronged people have a right to be angry.
"After more than a year of absolute hell, I'm going to be going back without a penny to show for everything that's happened!" she grumbled to Sigal Rozen, the director of the Hotline. So Rozen promptly suggested an idea she had been promoting to women in a similar situation for two years - without any takers.
"Why not get your deportation postponed - with the Hotline's help - so that you can stay and fight for your due?" Rozen proposed to Victoria. "Not only justice for those who have victimized you but just compensation for your labors."
So were born the three court cases currently being waged in Victoria's name or with her help. The first is a criminal case against three of her six "owners" and the errant son. The charges against them, it turns out, do not include trafficking in women, as Victoria was last "sold" a month before the amendment to the Penal Code made trafficking in human beings a crime in Israel. They do, however, include crimes equally as evil: rape and sodomy, in aggravated circumstances, among others.
The second is a civil case filed in the Beersheba District Labor Court in which Victoria, represented by the Hotline's energetic legal adviser, Nomi Levenkron, is suing all six of her "owners" for a combined total of almost $200,000 in back wages, interest, and compensation for the pain, suffering, and anguish she endured while enslaved by them.
The third is a petition to the Supreme Court for an injunction ordering the minister of internal security, the interior minister, and the Israel Police to pay for Victoria's upkeep ($1,500 a month, though there are legal precedents for demanding twice that amount) until she can testify in the criminal case.
Since being released from the Neveh Tirzah Prison early last November, Victoria has been living, in hid