Sandra Myers
The Dark Side of Immigration: Exploitation
Sandra Myers - The Dark Side of Immigration Exploitation
- Good evening everybody. First of all, I must apologise. I’ve got a good old fashioned English cold, sneezy and blocked, so you’ll have to excuse me if I sound a little bit strange. But anyway, this evening’s topic is very much following on from what Trudy was speaking here about yesterday was the migration from eastern Europe pretty much during the era of the pogroms from the Tsars, et cetera, et cetera. And I’ve called it the dark side of immigration exploitation and I hope I will make it clear why I’ve given it this title. It’s fundamentally about the Jewish white slave trade, which was the exploitation and pimping of young Jewish girls, mostly from eastern Europe by Jewish pimps, and I think it’s an absolutely horrendous story personally. It’s one that has been very much kept under wraps for nearly a hundred years and I hope by the end of my presentation you’ll see why and I’ll make it clear why. So this story focuses primarily on Argentina. There is a map of the world. Perhaps could we have the photograph of all the girls up, do you think, please. Okay, so here you see some photographs of the Jewish girls that were trafficked by the Jewish pimps. In the centre, slightly illuminated, you’ll see a photograph of a young woman by the name of Rachel Lieberman, who is pivotal to the story and to the demise of this trafficking ring and I will come onto her quite a bit later. So the story focuses primarily on Argentina in the second half of the 19th century.
And because Argentina at that time was a newly expanded country, they’d gained other territories through a series of wars, and it became an attractive destination for Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia and Poland, and of course, the poverty that they experienced there. Buenos Aires in particular grew rapidly and with it, the Jewish community there who wished to establish themselves as moral law abiding people. Sadly, however, this didn’t apply to all the Jews, as I will come on to explain. The girls were fundamentally trafficked between the years of 1870 and 1930. It came to a close in 1930, very much down to the ability of Rachel Lieberman, who you see there bringing the pimps to justice. But also, of course, once the rise of the Nazis came, travelled between eastern Europe and the west, particularly for Jews, became very much more difficult. The wave of persecution, particularly in Tsarist Russia made life untenable for so many, particularly the Jews. Approximately during this period, 2.75 million migrated west wards between the years of 1881 when the Tsar Nicholas was assassinated, and 1914, which was the outbreak of the First World War, they were seeking a better life for themselves and the majority headed for the new world, which they called the Golden Medina. Sadly, for many of the more vulnerable members of the society, they soon discovered that their lives were far from what they had hoped for or expected. And so it was for thousands of young Jewish girls, mostly between the ages of 16 and 19. Though some were as young as 13.
Could I have the next photograph up, please? Oh, not that one, oh, okay, sorry, no, not that one. Alright, it doesn’t matter. We’ll come onto it. This story has been suppressed for nearly a century, as I mentioned. And it’s not to suggest that the world was ignorant of this trade but far from it. Contemporary authors, reformers, newspapers, and women’s charities, all knew about the trafficking of these young girls. But all efforts to stem the tide came to nothing until one brave persistent young Jewish woman, as I showed you by the name of Raquel Lieberman, entered the story. I think before I start, I should put the issue of prostitution in the mid Victorian era into some sort of context. I realise, this might sound very harsh, but for many women, selling their bodies was the only way to stay alive, as well as being an era of great social, democratic and political upheaval. The 19th century was considered to be, and I put this in quotes, the golden age of prostitution. It was highly acceptable in many societies that men of all social strata, both married and single, would visit a brothel regularly. It was especially socially unacceptable to have a liaison, particularly with the bourgeois or the men of the upper classes, is to have a liaison with a woman of your own social standing and therefore, they would go to a prostitute. Legalisation of prostitution has varied over the years, but during the period under discussion, this was not illegal, neither in Europe nor in the new world, and particularly as I’m going to talk about in Argentina, and as it is today, actually, prostitution is still not illegal. It’s only pimping or curb crawling, or what’s the other thing that it’s called, soliciting.
That’s the only things that are illegal. Prostitution is actually not illegal in itself. Many Jews had the opportunity of making money wherever and whenever it presented itself, be it respectable or criminal. In eastern Europe and Russia, and particularly, by the mid 1800s, the largely impoverished Jewish community in the Pale of Settlement, constituted approximately 12% of the entire population. While Jewish women comprised overall some 22% of approximately 5,000 licenced prostitutes, which is actually, I think, quite a sort of high number as well as they also, not only were the prostitutes, but they were also the madams of the prostitutes. They controlled the brothels. Wherever there was poverty, whether it was Warsaw, Odessa, Vilna, Kraków, Budapest, there were Jewish prostitutes working for Jewish pimps while the authorities turned a blind eye. So what would make a woman turn to prostitution? Certainly for most, it wouldn’t be a lifestyle choice, but as I mentioned, poverty was rife at the time, and women generally had very little means of financial support other than parental or marital. Of course, there were occupations open to women such as laundresses, governesses, or factory workers, but even these were precarious. But there was another specific factor that affected Jewish women rather than the wider community. Of course, there were pogroms and persecution, but other factors, as I said, made it difficult for the Jews, the population, the modernization, and rapid urbanisation that grew in Tsarist Russia under Alexander II eradicated many of the traditional Jewish occupations. Additionally, of course, the Jews who lived in the shtetls lived under the yoke of Halakhic Law, which I’m sure most of you would know that it prescribes all aspects of life and the shtetls were very much closed communities.
The sexual mors of the traditional Jewish communities made it virtually impossible for women who had been seduced or had premarital relations, excuse me, or who were older and unmarried to find partners. So what was the one factor that affected Jewish women in particular? The one unique stigma was that of the agunot, a chained woman. At a time of mass migration, many young Jewish men left their wives and children with a promise to call for them when they had made their fortune abroad. In reality, we all know what often happened. By 1929, now this is to tell you how much the world already knew about this. By 1929, the World Jewish Women’s Congress in Hamburg reported that in Poland alone, there were 25,000 known agunot. That was 25,000 women who were living life in limbo. They were neither married nor widowed, and they had no way of proving if their husbands were still alive and added to which they had very little means of financial support. So I hope it may become clear why so many young Jewish girls and their parents saw the offer of a new life in the Golden Medina as being preferable to the one for which they may have been destined. So, my story begins in the photograph that you are looking at, which is an abandoned Jewish cemetery. This one is actually in Argentina, but it’s very similar.
There were cemeteries of this type in every big city in South America. And the one that I’m going to mention now actually was in Rio in a suburb called Inhauma. The cemetery was inaugurated in 1916 and has been closed since 1969. Apart from a few hundred men, here lie the remains of more than 700 women together with many of their children. Could we have the next photograph please? I think these are some of the tombstones of the men, and I think you can probably just see the shadow of one at the back in the middle. Some of these women died of natural causes, some of the illness or plague, some in childbirth. While sadly, some took their own lives. But one thing they all had in common was they were prostitutes. They were Jewish prostitutes. polacas called in the idiom of Brazil, which was Portuguese, shunned by their own communities and all victims of the Jewish white slave trade. Now you’re going to ask me why the pimps were buried there as well and I will come on to tell you that. As I said, similar cemeteries existed outside nearly every major city in South America though few survive today. The first picture that we saw outside of Buenos Aires is still intact. You can’t get into it unless you actually manage to get special permission and find someone to take you there. It’s about an hour and a half outside of the city and when I was there many years ago, I did ask somebody and they said, “Oh, well no, you don’t want to go there. You don’t want to see any of that.” And that was the end of the discussion. Near the city of Sao Paolo for instance, the abandoned cemetery was reclaimed by the municipality in the early 1970s to make way for a new highway. The remains of its 233 occupants were transferred to the main Jewish cemetery, but only 18 received tombstones with names.
The remainder of the remains were buried in a specially designated area under cement graves, with neither names nor dates. So nobody knew who they were. So why did these women go maybe willingly or unwillingly? They were only too willing to leave the grinding poverty and antisemitism of the rural shtetls and the urban ghettos as they had become. As I told you, the industrialization had created. They hoped to find a better future, and in reality, it was far more sinister than that. These young girls found themselves sold into sexual slavery and confined to the brothels, which sprang up in practically every large city in the new world. And I mentioned including South America, South Africa, Johannesburg, in India, they went far and wide and of course, in the United States. They were shunned. These young women were shunned by their co-religionists. They were forbidden to participate in synagogue services and most crucial of all, they were refused traditional Jewish burial rights, which was the reason why they bought these cemetery plots. A lot of them were actually bought by the pimps themselves, ironically, because the pimps were refused the same Orthodox Jewish burial rights. They weren’t allowed to belong to the synagogues, although they tried to patronise them and give them money, et cetera, et cetera.
The community in South America was trying to become respectable and shunned these men. Initially, the slave trade was controlled by a Warsaw based Jewish crime syndicate, which came to be known as the Zwi Migdal, the Beauty Tower, after its founder, Luis Zwi Migdal, and I’ll talk to you about that. At the height of its operations, it boasted more than a thousand members, both men and women and it was finally broken and its members brought to justice through the bravery and commitment of three people, not only Raquel Lieberman, who I talked about, who was herself a prostitute, but also a policeman who refused to be bribed by the name of Julio Alsogaray, and a Dr. Manuel Rodríguez Ocampo, who was an investigative judge in Buenos Aires. The story came to light on the death of the last polaca. She died in Rio, her name was Rebecca Friedman, and I will talk a little bit about her when we come towards the end. She was 103 and she was the remaining prostitute and the last remaining member of the Chesed Shel Emes, which was their own burial society, which the women formed because as I said, they were refused any burial rights under Jewish law. Can we have the next photograph, please? This is just the remains of another cemetery. Can we go onto the next one, please? Okay, so many of the women’s faces on the graves were defaced. This is just one photograph, and this is just an example of what people did to the faces. This was just one photograph of a woman who would’ve been buried there and can we have the next photograph, please? Okay, this is a young lady by the name of Sophia Kamoise. She was 13 when she was trafficked, and she died. She died when she was 18 of TB or something like that. She was swept off her feet by the man who came to woo her, but she actually died very young.
So that’s just a couple of the faces of the women that we’re speaking about because the large photograph was too detailed to actually see anybody. Can we have the next photograph, please? Okay, this is a photograph of a gentleman by the name of Baron Maurice de Hirsch. He was a German financier. He was a multimillionaire and he is very much the reason why South America and particularly Argentina became attractive to a lot of the young Jewish men who were immigrating. He had the idea, he had bought up large tracts of land there, and he had the idea of actually moving the three and a half million Jews who lived in the Pale of Settlement out of poverty to farm the lands, to work in the schools, become doctors and he actually started to build settlements, but he didn’t finish them, and it all went rather too slowly. And the bureaucracy back in eastern Europe was very inefficient because they only wanted to make sure that they found the right sort of immigrant and it took far too long. But he was a great philanthropist. And I’m sure many of you know there are several still, or there were Jewish gauchos who lived in Argentina. And it was very much because of Maurice de Hirsch that they started to go there. He spent approximately at that time, $3 billion or the equivalent thereof on the agricultural settlements. So how did the men lure these young women to go? Right, can we have the next photograph up, please? If I’ve got ‘em in the right order. Okay, so this was one of the sailing ships that they would have travelled on. Can we go on one more, please, and then go back to that one, and the next one, okay.
This is a photograph of two of the pimps actually on their way to trial, but it’s an example of how these men would have turned up. They travelled to eastern Europe, they travelled to the Jewish cities, they went to the synagogues, they bribed the beadles, they gave huge donations. And they put adverts in the newspapers saying that they offered marriage or the possibility of a young Jewish girl working as a governess for a wealthy Jewish family in South America. All their fare would be paid and they would be taken care of. Well, the reality was far from that. What they actually did was, in very many cases, with the blessing of the parents, who obviously had no idea what they were doing. They were married in a shul, it was called a stille chuppah. They dressed somebody up as a rabbi. They presented themselves as obviously looking very affluent. And if you could imagine someone like that turning up in eastern Europe in the 1870s, would’ve been unheard of. They were multimillionaires these guys. They married the girls, but of course they didn’t really marry them. They took them off to the ship and that’s where the trouble began. Could we go back to the first ship, please? Back, okay. So this was the type of ship they would’ve travelled on. They would’ve taken them either to Marseille or they would’ve taken them to Hamburg, or they might even have taken them to Odessa, but the families wouldn’t have known. And what they did once the girls were on the ship, they handed them over to their employees. When the girls were beaten, they were raped and they were locked in their carriages for the duration until the ship was pretty full.
So it could probably carry 300 passengers and it could probably be two months before the ship actually sailed. But the girls knew nothing of it. The journey to South America would’ve taken a good two months, I guess, at the sea, by then in those sorts of boats, allowing for weather and things like that. And when they got to South America, of course, they didn’t know the language. They didn’t know where they were. They were handed over to a pimp. They were trafficked like slaves. They were paraded naked for any buyer to see the merchandise. So, could we have the next photograph, please? Okay, no, back one. No, back to the crowd of men, please, that’s it. So this is a sort of scene that you would’ve found around the docks area or around the town areas of the big cities, Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro. There were approximately at the time, 10 men for every one woman. And as I said before, the reason that they would’ve gone is that they, obviously, the men didn’t know what sort of lives were going to be there and they had obviously promised, if they had wives and children, to call for them at a later date, which in actual fact didn’t happen. So the demand for women, I’m sure you could realise, was enormous. There were all these young virile Jewish men, or men. And it’s not that dissimilar to the boatloads of immigrants that are coming here now, because most of them are young men, in fact, looking for a better life or whatever. So when I went on to say, sorry, can we have the next picture please? And those are the pimps and another one, sorry, okay. When the girls arrived at the docks, they would see signs outside.
Now, the signs weren’t inside the docks as they disembarked because the people who posted them weren’t allowed to enter the docks because the pimps had bribed the dock officials and anyone who wanted to put up a notice like this was not allowed. So they had to put them outside. So for those of you who read French can understand pretty much what it says. It says to them, “Don’t ever accept to go with a stranger without knowing where you are going or with whom you’re going with. It’s the traffic, that sells young girls for the houses of prostitution, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s called La Traite Des Blanches, it’s called the White Slaves Trade. And the Society for the Protection are established specially to help you out and this is the address of this society.” So what good do you think these signs did? These girls, first of all, wouldn’t, I imagine, have read French. Second of all, they wouldn’t have spoken Spanish. Third of all, they would’ve spoken Yiddish, and most important, and they probably couldn’t read either. So between all of this, it was a lovely idea that actually served no useful purpose because they weren’t there. And by the time, of course, the girls exited from the docks, they were in the clutches of the pimps. So from there, as I said, the girls were taken to the bordellos, they were sold, they were paraded. Could we go onto the next photograph, please? Okay, this was a picture of what the bordellos would’ve looked like in one of the big cities and you can see the girls, oh, sorry, its my dog, hanging out the windows. There were approximately 30 to 40 women in each bordello. They worked from whatever hours they were told to work and you can see all the men hanging around. Okay, sorry. And this was the sort of atmosphere that they would’ve worked in. Oh, sorry, my dog. Right, I’m going to have a problem here, sorry. Really sorry, everybody. Okay, so let’s go on the next photograph.
Thank you, there’s a photograph of one of the young Jewish girls naked with the men bartering for her. If anybody’s interested, there’s actual wonderful film called, oh, excuse me. It’s not called Naked Bordello. I’ll tell you what the film is called afterwards. I’ve got it written down, sorry, the dog’s distracted me. And it’s very much a very evocative movie. Very much about this. So coming on from then, this carried on pretty much with impunity. Although the pimps were very much not part of the Jewish society, they were tolerated. Why, because they were patrons of the members of the Jewish community. They bought clothes for them, for their women. They bought meat from them. They bought their furniture, they bought their own clothes from them, and all of the pimps lived very much in the smarter parts of town. So they needed servicing, and what they used to do with the young girls is they used to take them in the evenings to the theatre. They used to parade them in front of the people at the theatre 'cause the theatre was mostly for men. Women generally, by and large, didn’t go to the theatre. So while they were shunned by the community very much, they were actually tolerated because of the custom. Until one night, a very brave young man stood outside the theatre and refused to let the men go in with the women. That was pretty much the end of that. So not only were they not part of the communities, but the respectable society wouldn’t have let them, I told you, into the synagogues nor to be buried in the Jewish cemetery. And as I said, the wealthiest of the Zwi Migdal were patrons and the centre of Jewish life in Buenos Aires. Sorry, and this confrontation that I mentioned just now really ended in a violent and bloody end. Going on from there, so what happened? What happened to these girls once they were there?
Very many of them managed to get out of prostitution by marrying the men who became their clients or who were their clients and the whole situation came to an end when a young woman by the name of Raquel Lieberman, can I have the photograph? Can we go on from there, please? Okay, oh, sorry, this is quite interesting. This is a sign that was up outside the brothel of Madam Ivonne. So it gives the prices of the various, I don’t what you would call them, treatments that you could have. So bucal was by mouth, right? Normal was normal. A half an hour was 1.2 pesos. A whole hour was a pesos and a half. You could have a threesome, so you could have two girls for five pesos. And it says water, soap and towels were offered free as a compliments of the house, and of course, for the police and the military, there was a 20% discount, there was special prices. So that shows you how much involved the actual authorities were in all of this. Can I have the next one please? Okay, and there’s two of these. There’s one here and there’s another one. This is a token with a Z on it. Could I have the next photograph, please? And this is the other side of the token. This is the other side of the token with a Magen David on it. These were the tokens that were given to the pimps who came to the brothels. The Z was for Zwi, and this was the Jewish, obviously, the Magen David, the pimps gave them to the girls and when they left after whatever they’d done, the girls gave them back to the person who was controlling the brothel. So they knew how long the client had been with them and the girl would tell them what had happened.
Obviously, not in great detail, but basically that was how they knew the volume of the trade. Okay, so, excuse me. When I said that this trade was known by the outside world. In fact, Victor Hugo wrote a letter in 1870, very much early on, the first boatload of women had arrived in 1867. 67 women had arrived, but from the 1870s onwards escalating right up until 1930, continuous boatloads of women, and they reckon something in the region of 10,000 plus women were trafficked like this. Victor Hugo wrote a letter in 1870 condemning the white slavery from Europe to South America, although he didn’t specifically single out the Jews, Sholem Aleichem, the Yiddish storyteller, who I’m sure most of you know, wrote a series of fable stories called the Railroad Stories, and actually the story of Tevye the Dairyman, which became Fiddler on the Roof, came from one of his stories and there was another one called the Man from Buenos Aires. And although you were never actually found out what his profession was, you were led to conclude that it was the exploitation of women. Because when the man was asked outright on the train, what was his profession, he said, “well, I don’t sell Chanukah candles, that’s for sure,” and if any of you have read the book, you can see that. So you also have to bear in mind during this period that women had no political rights, very few political rights, if not at all, in any of these countries during this period. And the ability to influence the public opinion was confined to volunteer work on women’s organisations. Plus of course, the fact that Jewish women couldn’t join Christian charitable organisations either in America nor in the United Kingdom, nor in Europe. So they had to form their own ones.
In Britain, they did try to protect the women. In 1885, Constance Lady Battersea, who was a Rothschild, established two organisations. One was the Shelter for Jewish Women in Distress, and the other was the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls. Various reports were produced on prostitution, and even if they were never read by those that they were most affected, several European conferences were held on combating trafficking in women. The first already by 1902, so it was quite early on. Bertha Pappenheim, who actually Trudy mentioned yesterday, was a member of the German feminist movement and she demanded equal rights for women. But I’m sure Trudy will do, is it would be a whole lecture unto itself together with Sarah Rabinovich and they travelled to Galicia to investigate the social situation there. I think I’m running short of time. So let’s go on to first of all how the ring was broken. So in 1922, a young woman by the name of Raquel Lieberman, could we go on please to show the photograph? Oh, this is a photograph of Luis Zwi Migdal. He was the pimp that gave his name to the organisation and why it was changed from the Polish name, it was the Warsaw something or other originally, was that the foreign minister of Poland objected to the name being used. So Luis Migdal gave it his name. Although there were several other organisations that acted independently. Now they ran very much as a business.
They had a president, they had a chairman, they had an accountant, they had board meetings. It was run very much as a business, which is why a lot of the records, when they were subsequently discovered, they knew what had happened. Could we go onto the next photograph, please? So now we have a photograph of Raquel Lieberman and her two young sons. Her husband had already travelled from Warsaw to South America, and she went out in 1922 to join him with her two children. She arrived there, she found her husband, she lived with him and a year after she arrived, he died of pneumonia. She was left with two young children. She didn’t speak the language, she only spoke Yiddish. She knew nobody in South America and she took the chance of leaving her two children with a carer in the countryside and went to the city to try and find work. Could we have the next photograph, please? This is her two boys as they grew up and the next one, please. Okay, this is her meeting her brother in the hat and her sister-in-Law. Now, when she went to the city to find work, she was a seamstress, but they agreed to find her work and unbeknownst to her, they put her in a brothel. They sold her as a prostitute. Could we have the next photograph, please? And that’s her sister-in-law, again, with her sister-in-law’s two children. And Raquel was sold into prostitution. She had no other means of support. She knew nobody other than her brother and sister-in-law and she didn’t speak the language. She managed after a very short space of time to actually save enough money because many of the prostitutes were allowed to keep some of their earnings, although a certain percentage obviously went to the pimps and she managed to actually open herself a small antique shop, extraordinarily, until the pimps came and trashed it.
They destroyed it all, and she was left back out of work, out of money, no one to speak to. She was offered a man. A man offered to marry her, and she took up this offer. Could we have an next photograph, please? Oh, these are her two sons as they grew older. Can we have the next one? Right, she married this man. This is the synagogue in Buenos Aires that was run by the pimps. She was married in this synagogue to this man. She was legally, genuinely married to him. Unbeknownst to her, he was also a pimp and he sold her back into prostitution, and upstairs of the synagogue, you can see the three windows, was a brothel. So whether he put her straight to work, one doesn’t know, but she tried her hardest and by 1930, she went again to the authorities and denounced the pimps. Fortunately, she found the right man at the time. As I told you, this one policeman who wasn’t corrupt, she found the judge who was willing to take it all seriously. And they actually managed to bring many of the pimps to trial. There was something like 300 odd of them bought to trial, a 108 were convicted and I think only three went to prison finally. But Raquel managed to break the ring. Sadly, she died in 1935 of TB. I think she died of TB, and her sons by then would’ve been, I suppose, in their teens by then. Whatever happened to them. The man that she married, his name was Salomón Korn, if that was of any help. So can we have the next photograph, please?
Okay, now after more than a hundred years, this is a plaque that has been put up in Buenos Aires on the wall and it says, “Near the old Red Light District.” I don’t know if anyone’s been in Buenos Aires particularly, but all along the river, there’s a beautiful area along the river they’re now lovely restaurants, and beautiful shops and restaurants. That was the red light district originally, and on the wall nearby, which says, “Here was exploited Raquel Lieberman.” And it says, “1900 to 1935.” And it says, “Her struggle continues.” This was put up. Now, interestingly enough, when this sign was dedicated, the shul, the Jewish community of Buenos Aires refused to allow them to have the dedication ceremony in the synagogue. They had to take a public hall to have the dedication ceremony. But at least, some recognition has been made that there was this exploitation of women. Now, normally, the times that I’ve been given this, I’ve done this presentation a few times before, and I’ve been asked, how did I come across it? Well, in the Jewish Chronicle in 1996, there was an article written called Those for Whom Nobody Says Kaddish, and a story was given to a journalist by Rachel Friedman. Could I have the last photograph up, please? This is the lady I talked to you about in the beginning, who died at 103. She was a flower seller in Rio de Janeiro and everybody knew who she was and she knew who she was. She gave the story to a journalist and she died just after she gave him the story. This was in 1994, she gave him the story and she donated money to Israel. She had a photograph of Theodor Herzl up in her bedroom and she knew what she was, she was very open when she gave . I could read you what she said to the journalist at the end of her interview, and it said she was part of the Chesed Shel Emes.
She was the one who gave these women their burial rights, who washed their bodies, who made sure that they were buried according to Jewish law, albeit in the cemetery for women. And she said, Rebecca, okay. Oh, no, I will tell you, “Those who died last suffered most because there was no longer money to support them. Some had children and grandchildren who helped, others committed suicide, such as Moira de Silva’s muse, Estera Lanuconez, and they died in poverty at home or in a state institution. Now I showed you the first cemetery that they had and she says she knew what she was. She knew that their lives had been hard, but there was no shame in it and what she said was that many of the children and grandchildren of these prostitutes, obviously didn’t want to talk about where their mothers had come from or what their mothers had been. But she said she acknowledged what she was. When the prostitutes or the children were asked what their parents or their mothers did, they said they were in the fur trade. I had a very interesting experience very many years ago when I gave this first in Alyth Gardens Shul which is in London and a very elderly gentleman at the time said to me, "Could I say something?” I said, “Of course.” He was probably in his nineties already by then, and he had been a German merchant seaman and in 1930, he was still with the German Navy. Jews could still travel, and they’d gone to Buenos Aires and they had smuggled two young Jewish prostitutes back to Hamburg on their ship.
They’d smuggled them out, and he regretted it every day of his life and now why did he regret it? Because had they stayed in Buenos Aires, their lives wouldn’t have been great, but they wouldn’t have perished or might not have perished in the Holocaust. So the story has a real irony to it, that this wonderful man who thought he was saving the lives of these two Jewish young girls, actually didn’t know what happened to them at the end. So I hope I’ve given you a feeling of what happened, what the story was. There’s lots of books you can read about this. There’s a wonderful book called A House is Not a Home by someone called Polly Adler. There’s another one called Raquel, A Marked Woman by Gabrielle Bohm. And the film I was trying to remember the name of, was called Naked Tango, it’s on YouTube and the one that I would recommend most of all is called Body and Soul by Isabel Vincent and it’s particularly the story of Raquel Lieberman. So I hope I’ve given you a feeling of what happened and what happened at the time and how it came to an end. If anyone has any questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Oh, wow, Betty, thank you for the story.
Yes, totally, Ingrid, pimping Jewish girls, yes. Oh, I’m answering it live, sorry.
Yes, I’m sure, Betty, it’s something that wasn’t discussed. As I told you, when I went to Buenos Aires myself many years ago, they said, “oh yes, yes. You don’t want to go, you don’t want to go there.”
Marilyn, I just heard The Third Daughter, yes. The story of The Third Daughter is rather romanticised. It’s very much this story that I’ve been telling you, it’s very much about the trafficking of the young Jewish girls. But The Third Daughter had a happy ending. I won’t spoil the ending for everybody, but it was very much, and I think it was a little bit romanticised, but it was a good read, it was agreed.
Oh gosh, what happened? Okay, there’s a book Bodies and Souls. Yes, thank you, Bodies and Souls. Okay, yes, okay. Someone’s talking about The Third Daughter as well, yes. Rhi, worked with hundreds of women who worked as prostitutes as a correction officer. They’re all someone’s sister, aunt, daughter, mother used to remind the pimps until we walk in someone else’s shoes. Yes, absolutely, okay.
The film about prostitution, The Impure, yes. That was the interesting film, The Impure.
Q: If the girl married her client, was she then accepted into Jewish community?
A: Oh, I can’t tell you, hopefully, yes.
Shelly. I guess most died of VD, illegal abortions or any, yes.
No, I don’t know if Nanette you’re asking if the Jewish community couldn’t save them if they died of VD or illegal abortions, one wouldn’t know. I mean, the Jewish community at that time was so desperate to become accepted as part of the respectable wider community. One doesn’t know if they had any, what my bubba used to call , is of course, they would’ve done.
Yes, David, yes. The trade to Argentina was linked to the triangle. It was indeed, as I mentioned, Poland, New York and Johannesburg, definitely, yes.
Yes, yes, Carol. I remember seeing back in the early days in Israel when we used to go down just north of Tel Aviv where they’ve built on the coast. You always used to see the Russian young girls there. Yes, very much so, I’m afraid.
Oh, Rhonda, oh, thank you, it’s a sad story. Barringer Hershey’s part of my extended family born in Battis.
Wow, Gertrude, that’s fantastic. He was an amazing man, actually. He made an awful effort, but unfortunately the administration, and I suppose, the bureaucracy just didn’t let it come to fruition. La Constinair along the river, I can’t remember the name of it. We went there, but it was ages ago, sorry. The Traite neighbourhood in Buenos Aires is Palermo, what’s the name of the cemetery an hour and a half from Buenos Aires. Oh, no, I will tell you, I’ll tell you what it’s called. I’ve got it written down somewhere and if I give it to Karina, I’ll make sure you get it. Or if you send an email in, they’ll send it to me and I’ll send it back.
Women are still being prostitute, why it’s called sex work? Definitely, Stewart, thank you much, I’m in my late seventies but never heard of this, no, sadly. And of course the reason that this story wasn’t brought to light is that the descendants of these women wanted to lead normal lives. Very many of them became politicians. They became respectable businessmen. They married, they had children and it just wasn’t something that was talked about, sadly enough. And these cemeteries were all locked up, as you saw the gates on this one.
Q: What happened to the children that were born?
A: Either they went to live with carers, or the mothers brought them up, or they were adopted. I don’t know, but many of them went on to… And there are some films on YouTube actually, of the grandchildren of some of these women who are desperate for this story to be brought into the public domain and for more investigation.
But unfortunately, a lot of the records were held in the shul in Buenos Aires that actually had a major fire back in the late 90s. They lost a lot of the records, but I think that they have managed to find a reasonable amount of them and they’ve been putting the story together. The ladies had their own mitzvah, absolutely. They had everything of their own. And in fact, they used to bring a hazzan in for the high holiday services because they couldn’t employ a hazzan but they used to bring one in who did it as very much as a charitable donation. They had their own, as I said, they had their own Hevra, they did everything of their own. They had their own vakuhz. The women did everything for the women. I dunno about the men.
Rhi, I think I’d answered that question.
Oh, I froze, sorry. My husband’s family came from the Carpathian Mountains and settled on a farm in Hirsch, Saskatchewan, Canada. You can still visit the area today and see the cemetery in one room school. I think we were lucky to come out as families and women didn’t get involved in prostitution. My husband was born wow, in Saskatchewan, and I didn’t know it went that far.
Oh, thank you, Mayra. Okay, I’ve never heard anything about this before. I grew up in Johannesburg and no one ever talked about this, the time period in… I don’t have anything about the time period in Johannesburg, but I’m sure it does exist and if I can find it, Jean, I will tell it to you. And as I said, the story only came to light in 1996 when this Rachel Lieberman gave the story. When Rebecca Lieberman gave the story to the journalist, that’s the only time it came. Destitute girls to go some church or missionary organisation, even if they had to convert, this happened to, I believe, in her. Oh, I dunno, I think if the girls were destitute, I don’t know if they would. But don’t forget, these girls didn’t speak the language. That was a real hindrance for them. I mean, most of them only spoke Yiddish. And in fact, I think all of them only spoke Yiddish.
Q: Okay, how is it the brothel above the synagogue was tolerated?
A: I have no idea, it’s a good question, it’s a good question. Yes, I presume, actually, no. I’m sorry I’m laughing at the question. I presume this synagogue was owned by the pimps, was owned by the Zwi Migdal.
Thank you. Marian, yes, , exactly, I do remember.
Q: Can you talk about New York prostitution, same gang or different?
A: It would’ve been a different gang, but I guess the story would’ve been very much the same. In fact, I had some interesting statistics on the number of, I don’t know whether it was prostitutes or gangsters that were criminals that were in prison in New York at the time and it was quite an extraordinary percentage of them were Jewish. I dunno if I’ve quickly got it to hand, whether they were actually prostitutes, whether they were actually the pimps or, no, I don’t think I’ve actually got it to hand. Yes, it was quite an astounding amount actually. I don’t think I’ve got it to hand, so if I find it, I’ll pass it on.
Q: Any traffic to the UK?
A: I don’t think so. I wouldn’t like to say totally, no. But the United Britain really wasn’t the destination for most of them and Argentina was so attractive because it was a new country and because there were so many men prorata to women, there was, as I said, at least 10 men to every woman there. So I suppose it was rather more attractive. Called showing at London JW three about prostitution. Oh dear, a topic of Jewish pimps of South Africa is documented by Charles van Onselen in the fox and the files, The Fox and The Flies.
Thank you, Jules.
Okay, oh, here, Silver Fox, that’s someone else is mentioning it in South Africa.
Okay, I think that’s all the questions. Thank you everybody very much for your attention and I sincerely apologise about my dog barking. I didn’t even realise that she was around. So, keep well everybody, stay safe and let’s hope the news is all good from Israel and thank you for your help at the end of my photographs. Goodnight.