The Zwi Migdal – Jewish Pimps of Argentina

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The Zwi Migdal – Jewish Pimps of Argentina


Repost from the old blog. You anti-Semites should go nuts over this one. (Well anti-Talmudics in my case... the CSR )

Interesting stuff. Ynet has some great articles about the Jews. Click the link for more.

Every society with prostitution has its pimps, of course.

In the US, pimping seems to be dominated by Blacks. I haven't heard of many White pimps, but I guess they exist. Part of the sickness and baseness of US Black ghetto culture is the glorification of the pimp and the streetwalker. We haven't many Blacks around here, but the few pimps and streetwalkers around here are almost always Black.

I understand that Albanians dominate the prostitution trade in the UK.

The anti-Semitic image of Jew as pimp and peddler of filth and depravity (Peddle some my way!) lacks a sound basis. However, in Argentina, Brazil, Poland and the Ukraine, Jews dominated the prostitution trade.

In one case, in Poland around 1910, there was a Jewish pogrom against the pimps! Pogroms in Poland around this time were often organized around the theme of "Jews are prostituting our women," and the local Jews had had enough. I think that 100 pimps were killed in this pogrom. I'm not sure if they killed prostitutes too.

It's an anti-Semitic lie that due to Jewish dual morality, Jews will only prostitute Gentile girls. The evil Jews are turning out our pure White women! In the case of the Zwi Migdal, it looks like they were only prostituting Jewish girls. I understand that the pimps of Israel (where there is a thriving sex trade) often traffic in Jewish in addition to Gentile women).

The Zwi Migdal were not supported by the Jewish community at large, to its credit. It lasted from 1870-1930.

Even by the turn of the century, Argentina had a very large Jewish population and it still has about 400,000 Jews.
http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009 ... argentina/


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(there's a never ending fount of Jewish corruption in Prostitution....the CSR...it's overwhelming when closely looked at...today.. this very day or in history... shocking and sad...  :shock:  )

Duped into slavery, women displayed spirit and strength

by ELAINE KALMAN NAVES, Freelance

The Gazette (Montreal) - November 5, 2005 Saturday

Bodies and Souls:

The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas

By Isabel Vincent

Random House, 264 pages, $34.95

Working in South America as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail in the 1990s, Isabel Vincent stumbled upon references to a mysterious cemetery for Jewish prostitutes in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. Curiosity piqued, she began a five-year quest which, she writes in Bodies and Souls, proved to be the most challenging investigative story of her career. This is a bold claim, given that Vincent is also the author of two other books - Hitler's Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of Justice; and See No Evil: The Strange Case of Christine Lamont and David Spencer - that required serious sleuthing.

Bodies and Souls is not merely the story of three Jewish women forced into prostitution, as its subtitle asserts, but also a retrospective look at the Jewish white slave trade, an obscene chapter in the history of vice.

From the 1860s to the beginning of the Second World War, thousands of naive, impoverished Jewish girls from the backwaters of eastern Europe were sold by Jewish mobsters into sexual slavery. This hugely profitable (annual revenues of $50 million in the 1890s) commerce in flesh was operated by the Zwi Migdal, a criminal association described by a contemporary as "an octopus, achieving an almost unassailable position." It was centred in Buenos Aires, with branch offices in Brazil, South Africa, India, China and Poland.

This tale of misery and exploitation (readers in search of titillation won't find any here) was rooted in the poverty of the shtetls of eastern Europe, from which many of the pimps as well as their victims sprang. Pimps returning from the Americas to their home villages in the garb and comportment of prosperous gentlemen faked marriages with girls gulled by reports of riches abroad. Disillusionment generally set in as soon as the women left their homes with their unscrupulous "husbands." Brutalization went hand in hand with deception in a vicious circle almost impossible to escape.

Charismatic and shrewd, the pimps were excellent managers who had everyone - from ships' stewards to politicians, bureaucrats, police chiefs and high-ranking judges - in their pockets. They were aided by other crooks, the so-called professors, "misery secretaries, who tallied up the earnings of the trade, oversaw the brothels, and arranged for false travel documents, especially for the underaged shtetl girls." The professors also wrote sanguine letters home that kept the reputation of the pious (and illiterate) shtetl girls intact.

The most surprising aspect of this grim story is how attached the debased victims of the trade were to their Judaism. Despised and reviled by their respectable co-religionists, in 1906 a group of nine Rio prostitutes calling themselves The Society of Truth drew up a blueprint for a burial society of their own. Ten years later, a newly arrived prostitute named Rebecca Freedman became their leader (the women called her their queen) and made it her mission to perform the sacred tahara ceremony of washing the dead.

Vincent shapes the narrative around the lives of three women: the unfortunate Sophia Chamys, who died at 18, after a five-year career in the brothels of Buenos Aires and Rio; the above-mentioned Rebecca Freedman; and Rachel Liberman, the woman whose testimony helped an honest cop destroy the Zwi Migdal in Argentina in the 1930s.

Vincent pieces together the bare bones of the lives of her subjects, but is ultimately frustrated by the secrecy that continues to surround the history of South American Jewish prostitutes, whose descendants persist in shying away from publicity even today, decades after the women's deaths. (Rebecca was the last to die, in 1984, at age 103.)

Because of the veil of mystery, Vincent often has to resort to suppositions and hypotheses about the motivation of her characters. At times, as when trying to account for Rebecca's devotion to the dead, the technique works. "Perhaps she wanted to make sure that God was paying particular attention to these hapless women. ... Or perhaps she somehow wanted to purify herself. ... For Rebecca Freedman knew she had sinned, and she may have been asking God's forgiveness for herself."

At other times, the long string of rhetorical questions exasperates the reader: "It's not clear when Sophia found out that Isaac Booroslky, her 'husband,' had sold her to Chumpaisk. ... Did Chumpaisk tell her on the ship, during the beatings and her frequent crying fits? Or did he tell her when they arrived in America?"

Notwithstanding this cavil, the book sheds light on an obscure page of history that is both tragic and uplifting. Victims of unscrupulous gangsters, the women portrayed in Bodies and Souls displayed spirit and strength in their solidarity with each other, their efforts on behalf of their children, and in their adherence to their faith and culture.

Elaine Kalman Naves is a Montreal writer.

GRAPHIC:

Photo: COURTESY OF RANDOM HOUSE CANADA; Rachel Liberman (centre) arrives in Buenos Aires, Oct. 22, 1922, and greets her husband, Jacob, and her sister-in-law.

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Forced to Sell Their Bodies Far From Home

By Isabel Vincent

Maclean's - November 7, 2005

A new book by ISABEL VINCENT uncovers the little-known tragedy of Jewish slave-prostitutes

From the 1860s to the late 1930s, thousands of young Jewish women from Eastern Europe were sold, tricked or forced into prostitution in Latin America, South Africa, India and the United States. Living in poverty in urban ghettos or rural shtetls, they fell victim to a gang of Jewish mobsters called Zwi Migdal. In Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas, Canadian journalist and author Isabel Vincent describes their lives of hardship and essential banishment from the Jewish community. What follows is an excerpt from the tale of a 13-year-old victim.

SOPHIA CHAMYS had never met a man like Isaac, and years later in Brazil, when she told her story to the police, she could still recall the smell of the lavender oil that he used on his hair and the feel of his silk handkerchiefs against her skin. But most of all she remembered his hands -- so refined and smooth, like a child's. In the shtetl on the outskirts of Warsaw where Sophia shared a one-room thatch-roofed house with her parents and younger sister, people had working hands -- misshapen, permanently chapped, sunburned, and covered in hardened blisters.

Sophia's father had such hands, from years of working the fields, eking out a living by collecting hay that he sold to local farmers. Already at 13, Sophia had hands that were rough and calloused from helping her parents. Perhaps she instinctively hid them behind her back when she felt Isaac's gaze upon her for the first time.

They met in Warsaw, at Castle Square, under the bronze statue of King Sigismund III, who stood defiantly clutching a large cross on a tall majestic column, overlooking stately row houses and the 15th-century royal castle. Congregating at the statue had become something of a tradition for the Chamys family on these fruitless trips to Warsaw. Perhaps they considered this rendezvous beneath the king a pilgrimage to hope: things would be different on the next trip to the city; bad luck could not last a lifetime.

Sophia and her family had walked the 25 miles from their shtetl to Warsaw, where her father had been promised work. But as was so often the case in the unhappy history of the Chamys family, the job never materialized. Standing with their oily cloth bundles under Sigismund III, the family was preparing for the long walk home when the elegant stranger loomed over them.

Isaac Boorosky approached the bedraggled family, introducing himself to Sophia's father as a successful businessman and a Jew. He told them he was looking for a maid to work in his widowed mother's kitchen in Lodz, which was just a six-hour journey over dirt roads from Warsaw. He nodded toward Sophia. How old is she?

Isaac didn't waste any time. After years of training, he knew how to spot a lucrative prospect. He knew to look beyond the ragged, loose garments and the filthy clogs worn by the peasant girls. He quickly saw Sophia's attributes -- the milky skin, the outline of budding breasts, the full red lips, the wisps of raven hair peeking out of the dark kerchief. What luck to discover such a specimen in the centre of Warsaw! How fortunate that his expensive new shoes and trousers would be spared the shtetl mud. "Eight rubles," said Isaac, barely containing his excitement and removing the money from his pocket. The amount was an advance on Sophia's first six months of service, and Isaac pressed the coins into her father's rough, sunburned hands.

Sophia's father hesitated, even though the money must have seemed a huge amount -- the equivalent of a year's wages for the family.

Later Sophia recalled the stab of anger she felt as her father refused the handful of coins. For even at 13, Sophia must have been aware that there were few prospects for young women from the shtetls, particularly those on the teeming outskirts of Warsaw. One foreign visitor had described them as manure-carpeted encampments -- "the eternal dwelling place of poverty."

Sophia knew that girls from the shtetl ended up exactly like their mothers and grandmothers. They seemed to spend a lifetime covered in soot as they cooked over a wood stove. They left their homes at sunrise to work in the fields, returning at dusk to prepare the evening meal, which many days was nothing more than a thin potato soup or cucumbers and onions in brine mixed with buttermilk -- if there was any buttermilk to be had.

For a girl like Sophia, there was no escape from the same kind of drudgery. Her parents were poor, even by shtetl standards, and could do little to improve their lot in life. They could not afford to send their daughters to school. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was little in the way of education for girls, even among wealthier Jews.

"I may have to beg to feed my daughters," Sophia recalled her father telling the handsome stranger in Warsaw. "But I will never be separated from them."

Isaac refused to give up. He was solicitous and charming, assuring Sophia's father that he would watch over Sophia as if she were his own daughter.

Like my own daughter.

The words might have sounded vaguely ominous to Sophia's father, but he chose to keep his fears to himself. Perhaps sensing the man's suspicions, Isaac handed him a card with his mother's address in Lodz. It was an open invitation for the family to visit Sophia whenever they found themselves in the city. No doubt, Isaac knew the sacrifice involved for the Chamyses in travelling even the shortest distance.

No, he would be safe from their scrutiny in Lodz. It was unlikely the Chamys family would ever make the journey. They were so poor they couldn't afford to take the train or travel by cart. They would have to walk if they wanted to see Sophia, and the trip would surely take them several days.

Finally, through heart-wrenching sobs, Sophia's father nodded his acquiescence. Of course, he had misgivings -- the kind that lodged themselves at the pit of his stomach and made him feel queasy. He knew it was wrong to hand his daughter over like this, even to this obviously refined, worldly man.

Had he heard the rumours of Jewish girls being taken into white slavery by fellow Jews? Young, beautiful girls like Sophia never heard from again? Was it the stuff of urban legend, crafted by wary peasants like himself who had an innate fear of the big city? Or was it another tall tale invented by the anti-Semitic authorities to dredge up hatred against the Jews -- another pretext for a bloody pogrom? Did Jewish strangers really prey on the daughters of the poor, and sell them into bondage? It was hard to believe.

In the end, Sophia's father agreed to take the elegant stranger's money.

Sophia was sold to a stranger in a public square in broad daylight in the civilized centre of Europe. Deep in his heart, Sophia's father must have known that he was indeed selling his daughter. Perhaps it was the dark realization that led to his wrenching sobs during the negotiations.

AT THE TURN of the last century, men like Isaac Boorosky belonged to a cadre of well-organized Jewish pimps who scoured the impoverished shtetls and urban ghettos of Eastern Europe looking for girls and women to sell into prostitution around the world.

They arrived in the most miserable backwaters, armed with gifts of coffee, chocolate, or cheaply made garments -- luxuries that were unattainable for most Eastern European Jews. Like Isaac Boorosky, they were impeccably dressed and spoke vaguely of their business holdings abroad. Some said they were ranchers, others that they owned jewellery stores or garment factories. They told the shtetl elders that they were looking for young girls to work in their factories, or, as in Isaac's case, that they needed another person on their domestic staff.

But most often the elegant strangers said they had returned to their own roots in the shtetls to search for suitable brides. Of course, it was an outright lie, but it was calculated to allay the fears of ignorant and suspicious peasants who knew little of the world outside their isolated communities.

Travelling through Poland in the early part of the 20th century, a French newspaperman described how the village matchmaker sometimes worked with the traffickers, cynically giving them advice on which women to target in small towns: "Such and such a house is no good: the girls are sickly. Avoid such and such a family: the father and mother mean to ask a high price. There's only a grandmother in that house and she won't last long. Take the child, she's the best bargain in the district. I've watched her for you like a peach on a wall. You need only pick it!"

The practice of recruiting young women for prostitution through promises of marriage became so commonplace that after the First World War, the League of Nations began to issue warnings. In one of its reports, the world body recounted the offences of an unidentified Polish trafficker, arrested in Poland following the war, who had "married" 30 girls, all of whom ended up in brothels in South America. The trafficker had found them through a marriage broker in Warsaw, who regularly put ads in the Yiddish newspapers.

DID SOPHIA'S FATHER suspect Isaac Boorosky of being a pimp?

There must have been something sinister about the man, something he didn't trust. A week after their emotional goodbye in Warsaw, Sophia's father decided to visit his daughter in Lodz. He was determined to return the eight rubles to Boorosky and take Sophia back to the shtetl where she belonged.

But Sophia did not want to leave with her father. For seven days, she had worked hard for Boorosky's mother, who lived in a large, well-appointed apartment in the centre of Lodz. Sophia had never known such luxury and couldn't believe her luck. Perhaps she was enjoying the luxurious sensation of sleeping on cotton sheets in her own bed. Had she tasted chocolate for the first time? Perhaps she had taken a bath in a real porcelain tub filled with hot water. In any case, Sophia must have imagined that she was turning into a proper lady. Isaac had bought her a beautiful taffeta dress and even petticoats made of silk!

Yes, everything is fine, Isaac told Sophia's father. Sophia is a hard worker, and well liked. Besides, confided Isaac to Sophia's father, if she continues to do such excellent work, perhaps she would even make a good wife.

Was this a marriage proposal? Did Isaac Boorosky mean to marry his daughter?

The promise must have done much to allay the old man's fears of bondage and white slavery, if such thoughts had actually crossed his mind. Now that he was convinced that Isaac Boorosky's intentions were noble, Sophia's father could return to the shtetl confident that she would be properly treated. His daughter would marry a gentleman, and perhaps now the family's life would change completely.

In fact, the day after Sophia's father returned to the shtetl, Sophia's life did change radically. Isaac told her she would no longer be working in his mother's kitchen. He asked her to put on the silk petticoats and taffeta dress. Sophia learned that she was to accompany Isaac to another one of his apartments, on the outskirts of Lodz. When they arrived, Sophia and Isaac ate what seemed to Sophia a sumptuous feast. Later, she would recall little of what they ate, and only remembered that Isaac filled and refilled her glass with beer, which tasted bitter and made her feel light-headed and sleepy.

Sophia later told police that she had no memory of what happened next. But when she woke up the following morning, she was deeply embarrassed to find herself lying in bed naked. Worst of all, Isaac was lying in bed beside her. "Now you are my wife," he said simply.

Brought up in a society where women rarely questioned men, least of all their husbands, Sophia believed everything Isaac told her. On the morning following the rape, when he deposited her in a house full of women -- a place that Sophia mistook for a hotel -- she didn't think to ask him why.

The prostitutes soon set her straight. Isaac Boorosky was a ruffian, they said. He bought and sold women, and he had bought her, Sophia Chamys, who was now the newest addition to his brothel. Sophia never talked about what she felt when she found herself in a brothel for the first time. She would only say that there must have been some kind of mistake; she refused to believe the prostitutes, and naively walked back to Isaac's mother's home in the city to sort things out.

Isaac greeted her warmly, but he made no mention of the brothel. How sorry he was that things had gotten out of hand. Yes, they would be together again soon, he reassured her, but first she must do him a favour. Perhaps he told her he needed to pay back a loan and would have to hire her out to a business associate in Konin. She would work as a scullery maid for a few months, until his debt was paid, and then they would be reunited in Lodz. On some level, Isaac must have made it clear that as his wife, Sophia would need to help him as much as she could, obey him without question.

Years later, Sophia readily admitted to police that the reason she decided to go to Konin was because Isaac had promised to send her by train. How many times had she and her sister heard the trains rattling to Warsaw! No one in the shtetl could afford to ride on a train -- not the tailor, the storekeeper, or the cantor. She would do anything to ride on a train, and believed Isaac when he said they would be separated for only a few months.

When she arrived in Konin, Sophia knew instantly she was destined for another brothel; this time she understood the brutal reality of what her young life had become. Isaac had sold her to a pimp named Libet, who ran a decrepit brothel on the outskirts of town. For more than a month Sophia worked as a prostitute for well-oiled and mustachioed gentlemen like Isaac, the man she still stubbornly considered her husband.

It's not clear how Sophia managed to escape the brothel. She told police that after she found out she was pregnant, she decided to return to the shtetl. She would have to tell her parents she was pregnant with her husband's child. There was no shame in that. But she could never, ever, tell them that she had been working in a common house, as a prostitute.

In the end, Sophia could say nothing about her ordeal to her family. The news would cause unbearable shame. But as she approached her old house in the shtetl, her parents and sister embraced her, and all began to speak at once. They touched her hair, felt her new taffeta frock, admired her shoes. Look at Sophia! they exclaimed with great joy. She's fat and so beautiful!

But where is your new husband?

At that moment Sophia learned that Isaac had promised her father that he would marry her when the old man showed up in Lodz to take her back to the shtetl. So it was true, Isaac's intentions were good. But why did he want her to work in a brothel?

Three days after she was reunited with her family, Isaac appeared at their door. He told Sophia's parents that he had urgent business in America and could not possibly leave without his new bride.

There was no time for a proper wedding, he said. Could the Chamys family round up two witnesses, and could they meet in the shtibl [prayer house] for the ceremony?

Even though the wedding was organized in such haste, and would not be officiated by a religious leader, the Chamys family would not have thought anything amiss. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, such ritual weddings were common in the smaller, poorer shtetls where rabbis were rarely present. The ceremony required only the presence of one Jewish witness, and was commonly referred to in Yiddish as a stille chuppah or "silent wedding."

Of course, this was very convenient for pimps like Isaac Boorosky, for whom the stille chuppah became a very important tool, allowing them to entrap ignorant women and rob them of their civil rights. It is not known how many impoverished young women Isaac married in these "silent weddings."

Sometimes the multiple marriages got out of hand, and traffickers would find themselves juggling too many women. The authorities who arrested Boorosky in Brazil said that it was not uncommon for him to return to South America from his frequent business trips to Eastern Europe with more than one wife. On one trip he "married" a Russian girl, took her to Austria, and hid her in a hotel while he used the same means to secure a local girl. He told the Russian wife that he needed to stop in Austria to buy up properties and to hire a housekeeper for his home in America. Like Sophia, the Russian woman would not have thought to question the man she took to be her new husband. A few days after his marriage to the new woman in Austria, Isaac confessed to the Russian woman that in order to arrange the Austrian's documents, he had to marry her as well.

Why did women put such blind trust in men like Isaac? The answer is easily summed up in one word: America.

"In America, people eat an orange every day." How many times had Sophia and her sister heard their neighbours say that? In the shtetl, oranges were rare, and reserved for very special occasions. But in America everyone was rich and oranges were plentiful. People in America also ate chicken every day, and had clothes made of silk.

Following the ceremony in the shtetl, Sophia returned to Lodz with Isaac, who told her she would sail with one of his business associates -- a man he identified only as Chumpaisk -- to Buenos Aires, a city on the other side of the world. The journey would take exactly 22 days by sea, he told her.

Buenos Aires?

DID CHUMPAISK rape her on the ship? Did he beat her so hard that she could now walk only with great difficulty?

It was a common occurrence among pimps who sailed with their young "wives" to South America. Aboard the ship, the men would at first calmly explain that once they docked in Buenos Aires, their "wives" would be expected to begin working as prostitutes. If a woman resisted, she was often raped and beaten into submission. The pimp, according to one police report, "undertook a system of planned demoralization on board ship, where he completely changed his language and manner." For girls like Sophia who could speak only Yiddish, communication with any of the ship officials proved impossible. Like Sophia, most girls must have resigned themselves to their fate.

It's not clear when Sophia found out that Isaac Boorosky, her "husband," had sold her to Chumpaisk in Lodz. Did Chumpaisk tell her on the ship, during the beatings and her frequent crying fits? Or did he tell her when they arrived in America?

It didn't matter, in the end. By the time they cleared immigration formalities in Buenos Aires, Sophia probably already knew she was Chumpaisk's slave and would have to do his bidding.

Sophia eventually returned to Boorosky and continued to work as a prostitute back in Poland, where her daughter died in infancy, and then again in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. After years of beatings and misery, at the age of 18 she denounced Boorosky to police in Rio. He was not arrested until a crackdown years later. Months after going to the Rio police, Sophia died of tuberculosis.

Excerpted from Bodies and Souls by Isabel Vincent. Copyright © 2005 Isabel Vincent. Published by Random House Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

GRAPHIC: Illustration, depiction of pimps recruiting young women: preying on the poor with promises of marriage, COURTESY OF TAMIMENT COLLECTION, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY; Photo 1, The Buenos Aires red-light district in the 1920s, COURTESY OF YIVO INSTITUTE, NEW YORK; Photo 2, BODIES AND SOULS, Isabel Vincent, Random House of Canada, $ 34.95; Photo 3, THE PROSTITUTES soon set her straight. Isaac Boorosky was a ruffian, they said. He bought and sold women, and he had bought her, Sophia Chamys.

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Women who deserved better: The hidden story of Jewish prostitutes in fin-de-siecle South America

by Shelagh Plunkett

Special to the Sun

Vancouver Sun

November 12, 2005

BODIES AND SOULS

The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas

BY ISABEL VINCENT

Random House Canada, 276 pages ($34.95)

history I In her book, Bodies and Souls, Isabel Vincent tells a tragic tale. Sadly, it is neither a new story nor one we have outgrown and relegated to history. Her book is about women, specifically poor Jewish women, sold into slavery, forced into prostitution and discarded by their religious community.

Bodies and Souls pieces together the lives of three women -- Sophia Chamys, Rachel Liberman and Rebecca Freedman -- who, along with thousands of others, were entrapped by the Jewish crime gang Zwi Migdal. From the late 1860s to the early 1930s, the powerful gang trafficked young Jewish girls from the urban ghettos and rural shtetls of Eastern Europe to Argentina and Brazil.

In Latin America, the girls were forced to work in some of the 3,000 Argentinian brothels the crime gang ran with the tacit support of local police.

The South American Jewish communities knew about the brothels and the way in which these girls were brought and held there, but they refused to help. The young polacas were denied admission to the synagogues and denied Jewish burial rites and entrance to Jewish cemeteries. The communities labelled even the children and grandchildren of these women unclean.

Vincent, an investigative reporter for the National Post, describes the methods the Zwi Migdal used to entice young women. They're remarkably similar to those you'd find if looking into the same situation today. In Warsaw, a well-dressed man approached Sophia Chamys' father. Isaac Boorosky said his mother, living in Lodz, needed a maid. Sophia's father saw this as a chance for his daughter to escape the poverty of their shtetl. He knew about the "white slave trade" but hoped the elegant man was honest.

This is exactly the approach present-day traffickers take when recruiting girls in poverty-stricken areas of Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. Promises of marriage or of a legitimate job in the city, stories of how good life was in the New World, where "everyone eats oranges every day," were used by Zwi Migdal recruiters in the last century, just as they are today.

Although this is an interesting parallel (and one Vincent acknowledges but doesn't pursue), the compelling aspect of Bodies and Souls is the story of how in 1924 the polacas of Rio de Janeiro founded the Society of Truth, an organization intended to provide support to the women in their old age. Through it, they established their own synagogues, bought land for their own cemeteries and performed burial rites on the bodies of those among them who died. These were strong women, determined to survive and build a better life for their children.

Unfortunately, the details of how they managed to do this are scarce. Rebecca Freedman, the last president of the Society of Truth, died in 1984 at age 103, long before Vincent began her research. The closest the author got to members of the society (disbanded in 1968) was to interview the custodian of its Rio de Janeiro cemetery, a man hired by Freedman, and to interview a journalist who had interviewed Freedman on her deathbed.

For the rest, Vincent relied on police records, archived documents, letters and the reminiscences of those willing or able to pass on rumours.

Vincent had difficulty getting descendants of the women to talk -- and, even, in some cases, to acknowledge that their grandmothers or aunts were among the polacas trafficked to Argentina and Brazil in the last century. To fill the gaps between scant documentation and interview subjects, she resorts to informed speculation. This carries the narrative along, but the result lacks the authority of concrete detail. The reader is left frustrated and unable to get close to the women the book is about.

To compensate, Vincent fills Bodies and Souls with background material. The book offers information on the Jewish Colonization Association, which sponsored immigrants to Argentina; describes the efforts of Jewish feminist organizations, whose volunteers met South America-bound ships and warned young female passengers about the dangers of talking to strange men; and examines work done by various organizations to halt the white slave trade.

Vincent also gives the reader vivid descriptions of European shtetl life, Brazilian and Argentinian slums, scenes from Latin American ports and colourful portrayals of the clothing and manners of Jewish pimps and prostitutes.

It's unfortunate that, despite her research, she was unable to provide the kind of details her readers are likely to crave once introduced to the women who founded the Society of Truth. These are compelling women; we want to know them better than we do by the end of the book. Regardless, Bodies and Souls is an interesting read and provides a glimpse of a little-known part of our past.

Shelagh Plunkett is a freelance writer on Saltspring Island. She last reviewed Helen Oyeyemi's novel, The Icarus Girl.

Photo: Courtesy of Tamiment Collection, New York University / A drawing that shows how young, naive, shtetl girls were often recruited into brothels by wily pimps, from the book Bodies and Souls, by Isabel Vincent.; Photo: BODIES AND SOULS: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas BY ISABEL VINCENT, Random House Canada, 276 pages ($34.95)

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Journalist investigates dark chapter in Jewish history

By SHELDON KIRSHNER

Canadian Jewish News - November 24, 2004

"It was a huge challenge for a journalist to piece together this story," said Isabel Vincent, discussing her latest book, Bodies and Souls, which is bound to shock many readers.

Published in Canada on Nov. 5 by Random House, Bodies and Souls – the first popular work on the subject in English – explores a dark, hushed-up chapter of modern Jewish history.

During an 80-year period from the 1860s onward, a Jewish criminal gang, Zwi Migdal, lured thousands of young, impoverished, naive Jewish women from eastern Europe into prostitution.

Thinking they were going abroad to be domestics or factory workers, or simply duped into marriages of convenience, they found themselves confined in brothels in Latin America, the United States, South Africa, China and India.

Vincent, a Toronto-based writer of Portuguese ancestry who wrote for the National Post until recently, builds her narrative around three such women who ended up in Brazil and Argentina.

Considered unclean by the Jewish communities, they were shunned, as were their pimps. Ostracized, they formed synagogues and institutions. In Rio de Janeiro, they established their own cemetery.

Although decades have elapsed since Zwi Migdal's heyday, the topic is so sensitive that it is still very much off-bounds in Jewish circles in Rio and Buenos Aires. "In some quarters, there is still a stigma, a code of silence, about it," said Vincent.

She spent five long years researching the subject because of the difficulty of convincing people to speak openly about the polacas, the Jewish prostitutes from the shtetls and cities of eastern Europe.

Indeed, only about 10 per cent of the individuals she approached were willing to talk, and not one of their thousands of descendants agreed to be interviewed.

Despite the constant rebuffs, she did not despair. "I knew the information was there," said Vincent, whose last book was Hitler's Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold and the Pursuit of Justice.

She immersed herself in the literature, reading what she could find in libraries, from Edward Bristow's Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1879-1939 to Nora Glickman's The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman.

Vincent also pored over Beatriz Kushnir's Portuguese language account of the Jewish slave trade, based on her MA thesis. "She was very helpful," Vincent said of Kushnir. "She handed over her archives to me."

In addition, Vincent scoured national, municipal and state archives in Brazil and talked to 28 women and men in Rio and Toronto whose first-hand or anecdotal knowledge of shtetl life and the workings of Zwi Migdal was of immense value.

To her regret, she did not have access to the most complete set of archives relating to Zwi Migdal. It was destroyed in 1994 when Iranian-abetted Muslim terrorists attacked a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires.

Vincent, however, was able to visit the prostitutes' cemetery in Inhauma, a Rio suburb, where 797 gravestones moulder away. The caretaker told her that the last burial was in the 1970s.

She was unable to read the cemetery's registry book, which disappeared several years ago. She believes that well-meaning "historians" who sought to erase a black mark on the past destroyed or hid it.

Vincent, 40, knew next to nothing about these women when she started her research. "I had heard references about the polacas in Brazil, but didn't know what they meant."

Once she was hooked, there was no turning back. "I thought there was a great human story to tell, and I felt sorry for these people. Although they were marginalized, they clung to their faith. That, to me, was so moving."

Vincent, whose parents immigrated to Canada in 1953, wrote two drafts of Bodies and Souls, the rights of which have been sold in Israel, Spain, Italy and Poland so far.

Her first draft was far too scholarly. "It read like a university text. Nearly all the sentences were footnoted," she said.

At her editor's suggestion, she revised the manuscript, making it fully accessible.

In her estimation, 10,000 to 15,000 Jewish women were caught in Zwi Migdal's net. Only a handful are still alive.

As far as she knows, Zwi Migdal was never active in Canada.

According to Vincent, the illicit trade has inspired novels – O Ciclo das Aguas by the Brazilian Jewish writer Moacyr Scliar comes to mind – and at least one samba.

Asked whether Jews are involved in South American prostitution today, she said, "I didn't look into that issue."

(Top)

Zwi Migdal ring preyed on Jewish women

By SHELDON KIRSHNER

Canadian Jewish News - November 24, 2004

http://cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id=7804

Shalom Aleichem, in his Yiddish short story The Man from Buenos Aires, wrote about a Jewish salesman from Argentina named Motek who was coy about the goods he sold. "I supply the world with merchandise, something that everybody knows and nobody speaks of," Motek said obliquely. "What do I deal in? Not in prayer books, my friend, not in prayer books."

When The Man from Buenos Aires was published in the early 20th century, men like the mysterious Motek, impeccably dressed and bejewelled, were riding high. Purveyors of the flesh trade, and members of a mainly Jewish criminal gang known as Zwi Migdal, which thrived from the 1860s to the 1930s, they were white slavers who preyed on young, impressionable, impoverished Jewish women from the backward shtetls and teeming ghettos of eastern Europe who dreamed of a better future in the Americas.

Promised work in factories or homes, or supposedly betrothed to the well-mannered visitors who lavished flattery and gifts upon them, these women were duped into prostitution in South America and the United States.

In Bodies and Souls (Random House Canada), Canadian journalist Isabel Vincent delves into that nether world of broken dreams, sordid brothels and tropical sunsets and produces a fascinating social history as partly seen from the perspective of three such women, Sophia Chamys, Rachel Liberman and Rebecca Freedman.

Vincent, an investigative reporter on the staff of the National Post until recently and the author of Hitler's Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of Justice, culled her material from archives, academic studies and interviews. Bodies and Souls is the first book I've read on this relatively little-known topic, but it has been the subject of monographs and newspaper articles, some in Portuguese.

At the height of its influence after World War I, Zwi Migdal controlled bordellos around the globe, from New York to Shanghai. But the focus of its activities was in South America, particularly in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, which had fairly substantial Jewish communities.

Vincent estimates that Zwi Migal operated some 3,000 brothels in Argentina, most in Buenos Aires, and many in Rio. But lest the wrong impression is conveyed, she points out that Jewish criminals hardly had a monopoly on the international white-slave trade. Japanese and Chinese criminal gangs played the biggest role in the trafficking of women, but the venal gangsters in Zwi Migdal were not exactly minor players.

Although legions of Jewish women recruited by Zwi Migdal had no inkling of what awaited them overseas, many knew what to expect. Indeed, some became brothel owners and recruiters.

Not surprisingly, the Jewish community shunned the white slavers and prostitutes. They were banned from joining communal institutions, synagogues and burial societies. Jewish restaurants discouraged their patronage, while Jewish theatregoers were liable to leave their seats if they found themselves next to an "unclean" person.

Ostracized by their fellow Jews, the prostitutes in Rio formed their own burial society, the Jewish Benevolent and Burial Association, popularly known as the Society of Truth. In 1916, they bought land for their cemetery in the grimy suburb of Inhauma, which Vincent visited while researching this book. There she found 797 graves, all badly maintained, the last of which were installed in the 1970s.

Farther north, in Rio, Jewish prostitutes acquired a downtown building in the 1940s that they converted into a synagogue and administrative offices. According to Vincent, organizations along the lines of the Society of Truth were established in Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and New York, but they were largely run by the pimps.

Zwi Migdal, which had its origins in Poland, emerged in the 1890s under the guise of the Warsaw Jewish Mutual Aid Society, just as the white-slave trade was taking off. A coalition of independent white slavers functioning as a corporation with a board of directors, Zwi Migdal spread its tentacles to Argentina, Brazil, India, South Africa and China. By the turn of the 19th century, they controlled thousands of women and turned annual profits of more than $50 million, a fabulous sum back then.

Claiming that they were not common criminals, Vincent says they had a bevy of lawyers at their disposal and bribed officials from ship stewards to government bureaucrats and police chiefs.

Under pressure from the Jewish community and the Polish embassy in Buenos Aires, which resented that a trade organization of pimps had been named after Poland's capital, Argentina ordered a government official, Martin Perez Estrada, to investigate the Warsaw Jewish Mutual Aid Society.

Estrada, who had been on the pimps' payroll for years, finished his investigation in a only a week. His conclusion was that its members were upstanding citizens and beyond reproach. Argentina shelved his report, but when the Polish authorities complained to the foreign ministry, the pimps reacted with alacrity. They changed the society's name to Zwi Migdal ("the great power" in Yiddish), in honour of Luis Migdal, one of the society's earliest benefactors, whom respectable Jews considered a dreg of humanity.

Zwi Migdal representatives roamed eastern Europe far and wide, proffering gullible Jewish women allegedly decent jobs and proposals of marriage. "Believe me, these poor souls are waiting for me as though I were the Messiah," crows Motek in The Man from Buenos Aires.

Sophia Chamys, who shared a one-room thatch-roofed house with her parents and younger sister on the outskirts of Warsaw, was one of the victims whose story of hope and deprivation Vincent relates with aplomb. Like so many women of her class, Chamys married the pimp who passed himself off as a prosperous businessman. She wed him in a ceremony commonly referred to in Yiddish as a stille chupah, or "silent wedding."

These ritual marriages, Vincent explains, had absolutely no validity under civil law and suited the pimps. The stille chupah, which had been outlawed in some jurisdictions, entrapped ignorant women and robbed them of their civil rights. Typically, pimps travelled from shtetl to shtetl and acquired multiple wives in such ceremonies. In tow with their new "wives," the pimps boarded ships bound for South America. During the voyage, the pimps told them that they would work as prostitutes. If they resisted, they were beaten and raped.

Pimps lived the good life. Concerned with their appearance, they wore tailored suits, silk shirts, gold tie pins and diamond rings, applied fragrant oil to their hair and indulged themselves in pedicures.

The richest ones posed as legitimate businessmen, mostly as jewellers, tobacconists and clothing vendors. And they were terribly conceited. Vincent quotes one pimp as boasting, "The profession of pimp is nothing for an ordinary man to undertake. We must be administrators, instructors, comforters and experts in hygiene. We need self-possession, a knowledge of character, insights, kindness, firmness and self-denial; and above all things, perseverance."

An Argentine police report Vincent cites notes that Zwi Migdal was "set up like a commercial enterprise based on mathematical calculations and financial forecasts. These people are incredibly disciplined; they think of everything and pay a great deal of attention to the tiniest details."

The prostitutes in their thrall led miserable lives. In the filthy casitas of La Boca, a working-class district in Buenos Aires, they serviced upward of 70 men a day, and comported themselves with sadness, a French journalist wrote. More often than not, they had to hand over their initial earnings to pimps to reimburse them for the cost of their passage across the seas.

In Rio, their services were sought out mainly by sailors, small businessmen and new immigrants. Wealthier men, from captains of industry to politicians, gravitated toward French prostitutes. When the first of the Jewish women from Poland arrived in Rio, the red-light district in Mangue was dominated by blacks. They had only recently gained their freedom from slavery, which was abolished in Brazil in 1888.

The desperate poverty of New York's Lower East Side fed Zwi Migdal's appetite as well. The majority of Jewish prostitutes there toiled in so-called "50 cent and dollar" houses unfit for human habitation.

During the 1930s, the police in Argentina began cracking down on Jewish pimps, charging them with "illicit association" under the criminal code. In the face of constant raids, they fled to Uruguay and Brazil, transferring their operations to Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia. Zwi Migdal would never again attain the kind of unrivalled power and influence it wielded in Argentina. But the legacy it left behind remains a stain on modern Jewish history.

http://www.theawarenesscenter.org/zwimigdal.html