- "Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion] could not
imagine that Jewish women would stoop to crime or prostitution. When
an associate, Meyer Weisgal, who resembled David Ben-Gurion, once told
him humorously that a girl had walked up to him on a London street and
offered her services, overwhelmed by the idea of sleeping with the
'Israeli prime minister.' Ben-Gurion, clearly troubled, was interested
in only one thing: 'Was she Jewish?'" -- Dan Kurzman, 1983,
p.39
-
- At the end of the 19th and beginning of the
twentieth century, Jews were deeply involved in what was popularly
called "white slavery": international prostitution rings. "White
slavery," notes scholar Albert Lindemann, "was a concern of Jewish
leaders throughout the world, who recognized it as a special problem."
[LINDEMANN, p. 33] [Jews have also dominated the pornography and
commercial sexploitation business, a trend which continues to this day
-- see Mass Media section]
-
- "Between 1880 and 1939," notes scholar Edward
Bristow, "the Jews played a conspicuous role in 'white slavery,' as
the commercial prostitution of that era was dramatically called. Not
only was this Jewish participation conspicuous, it was historically
unprecedented, geographically widespread, and fraught with collective
political dangers." [BRISTOW, p. 1] "Jewish trafficking," says
Bristow, "was anchored in brothel keeping, women freelanced or kept
houses while their husbands procured ... Jewish traffickers also
supplied Gentile-run houses." [BRISTOW, p. 56-57]
-
- Rooted largely in Eastern and Central Europe where
they "dominated the international traffic out of the area," [BRISTOW,
p. 2] Jews were involved in prostitution rings that networked, wrote
Arthur Mora (of London's Jewish Association for the Protection of
Girls and Women) in 1903, to "almost all parts of North and South
Africa, to India, China, Japan, Philippine Island, North and South
America, and also to many of the countries of Europe." [BRISTOW, p. 1]
Jewish criminals trafficked women under their control virtually
anywhere, also including the major cities of Bulgaria, Bosnia, Greece,
Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Ceylon, Manchuria, South Africa, Rhodesia, and
Mozambique. [BRISTOW, p. 181]
-
- "By 1900," says Bristow, "Jewish commercial vice was
largely incorporated in underworld elements and many of it
participants were predators of the poor." [BRISTOW, p. 89] Jewish
pimps, procurers, and traffickers preyed mostly on non-Jewish women,
but even large numbers of Jewish women were part of their
stables.
-
- In 1872, for example, Jewish prostitutes in Warsaw
numbered 17% of the known prostitution population, in Krakow 27%, and
in Vilna 47%. [BRISTOW, p. 23] Within the Jewish community itself, it
was not uncommon for recruiters to marry innocent Jewish young women
and "deposit them in foreign brothels." [BRISTOW, p. 25] Many of the
Jewish criminal underworld figures apparently saw no gap between their
day-to-day activities and their religious lives, often maintaining
their religious obligations. A Warsaw thug, Shilem Letzski, organized
a small synagogue for Jewish "prostitutes, madams, pimps, and
thieves." This criminal community even had a rabbinical court "to
settle disputes between pimps." [BRISTOW, p. 60] In Constantinople,
prostitutes contributed money to "have their pimps called to Torah on
holidays." [SCHNEIDER, p. 225] In New York City, "a public school and
a large synagogue were situated right next door to the house of
prositution." [RUBINOW, I., 1959, p. 114-115]
-
- In Buenos Aires, Argentina, notes Donna Guy, the
Jewish pimp organization called the Varsovia Society
-
- "ostensibly functioned as a mutual aid society ...
In fact, the Varsovia consisted of pimps who wanted to maintain their
business and still lead a religious life ... Varsovia associates
established their own synagogue on Guemes Street in the midst of the
traditional bordello district." [GUY, p. 22]
-
- Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway notes also, for
example, that prominent Jewish American mobster Longy Zwillman "always
remained sensitive to his Jewish upbringings." When a close friend
died, and the funeral was conducted in a church, Zwillman refused to
attend. As he explained it, he was an ancestral member of the Jewish
priest caste (the Cohens) and it was religiously forbidden to him to
be with a dead body in a room. [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 30]
-
- Dr. Louis Maretsky, the head of the B'nai B'rith in
Germany, forlornly noted in 1912 that at least 271 of 402 prostitution
traffickers on a Hamburg police list were Jewish; in reviewing similar
lists for Eastern Europe and South Africa at least 374 of 644 were
from the Jewish community. [BRISTOW, p. 56] (No mention here is made
of even higher possible percentages: as explored later, it has long
been a tradition for many Jews in their diaspora to formally change
their identifiable Jewish names). Concerning Galicia, Maretsky wrote
that "the prominence of Jewish traffickers and brothel operators there
is no doubt. From the files of the Austrian and German police there
were 111 Jewish traffickers active in Galicia and the neighboring
province of Bukovina for 1904-08 alone." [BRISTOW, p. 56]
-
- By 1889 Jewish women ran 203 of 289 (70%) of the
licensed brothels in the "Pale of Settlement" (encompassing over 20
provinces in eastern Poland and western Russia -- an area where Jews
were about 12% of the population). 1122 of 5127 (22%) licensed
prostitutes in this area were Jewish. [BRISTOW, p. 63] The grievous
political dangers for local Jewry in the context of enduring
interethnic hostilities, when 78% of the rest of the women were
Gentile, many indentured in Jewish houses, is obvious.
-
- Further in the West, 16 of 19 licensed brothels in
Warsaw were run by Jewish women, prostitutes in the low-class
establishments were expected to service 40-50 customers a day, up to
60-70 on Holy Days. (In 1905 the respectable part of the Jewish Warsaw
community rioted against the brothels; 40 whorehouses -- legal and
illegal -- were reported destroyed, 8 persons killed, and 100
injured). [BRISTOW, p. 61]
-
- In Minsk, Jews ran all four legitimate houses of ill
repute. In the Russian province of Kherson (which includes the city of
Odessa) 30 of 36 licensed brothels were Jewish-owned. The American
Consul in Odessa wrote in 1908 that the "whole 'business' of
prostitution is almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews."
[BRISTOW, p. 56]
-
- Martin Fido notes another genre of Jewish Eastern
European profiteer in the prostitution world, in England:
-
- "Latvian ponces accompanied [prostitutes] to help
them cross borders and find accomodation and working premises. These
men were despised by police and by some of the criminal fraternity for
'living off immoral earnings.' But they were not pimps ... They were
effectively travel agents, couriers and managers in strange and
unfriendly places. Their arrival in London ensured that a major strand
of prostitution would be controlled by organized crime. One of these
Latvians, Max Kassell, was still running a small stable of hookers in
the 1930s, when he was murdered in Soho ... Jewish dominance of the
East End [of London] and its crime was reflected in their Yiddish
name, 'spielers' (places for games). In the Brick Lane neighborhood,
Isaac Bogard, a Jewish villain whose swarthy complexion and tightly
curled black hair earned him the nickname 'Darky the Coon,' extended
his interests. He began in the early years of the 20th century by
supplying muscle for street traders who wanted to prevent newcomers
from moving in, but he moved on to managing prostitutes and drinking
clubs." [FIDO, M., 2000, p. 19-20]
-
- Then in London there was Harry 'Little Hubby'
Distleman, "a Jewish club manager, gambler and possibly part-sharer
(with his brother) in a chain of brothels." [FIDO, M., 2000, p. 31]
Jewish author Chaim Bermant noted in the Jewish Chronicle in 1993 that
"In the same period (1903-1909), 151 aliens [in Great Britain], most
of them Jewish, were convicted for keeping brothels, and 521 for
soliciting ... Rabbi Avigdor Schonfeld ... protested that to draw
attention to the existence of Jewish prostitutes harmed the good name
of the Jewish people." [JEWISH CHRONICLE, 1-15-93]
-
- More recently, Jewish singer Eddie Fisher recalls
that "while performing in England in the late 1950s I had become
friendly with a Jewish song plugger, a man who eventually left the
music business to open a very exclusive whorehouse." [FISHER, E.,
1999, p. 293] A little later, there was the infamous Colin
Levy:
-
- "In 1973, one of the better-known and more
appreciated solo practioners of that tony [London prostitution]
underworld was Norma Levy (nee Mary Russell), an Irish-born prostitute
in her mid-twenties whose career 'on the game' ws being managed by her
husband Colin Levy, a petty crook ... In 1973, Colin Levy found
himself short of money. Aware that one of Norma's patrons was the
celebrated Lord Lambton, he decided to solve his problem with a bit of
blackmail. Camera in hand, he lay in wait outside Norma's bedroom
during Lambton's next vist to her flat. At the appropriate time, at a
signal from Norma, he burst into the room. With flashlights popping in
his face, the stunned Lambton was frozen on film, in flagrante
delicto, for posterity." [Levy's blackmail failed, but there was a
resultant scandal, including the ethics of newspaper (where Levy tried
to sell his photos] that published accounts of the story] [KIERNAN,
T., 1986, p. 162]
-
- In Vienna, authorities knew of about 50 Jewish
prostitution traffickers based in Czernowitz, "and they were a very
inbred lot extending over two generations." [BRISTOW, p. 74] The most
publicized 'white slavery' trial occurred in 1892, in Lemberg (once
also called Lvov, then a Polish provincial capital, today called Lviv
in Ukraine), where 27 traffickers -- all Jews -- were prosecuted for
ensnaring women to go to Constantinople, Egypt, and India. Some of the
women recruits understood their tasks, but others "were maids, others
fieldworkers, one a butcher's helper, all apparently promised honest
jobs." [BRISTOW, p. 74] (Lemberg, "a cradle of Zionism from the 1880s
onward," also had anti-Jewish riots in 1918. [KRAJEWSKI, S., p. 340]
)
-
- There was a tradition of Yiddish folk songs about
Jewish criminal behavior, like this:
-
- "I am Salve, the thief, Four brothers are we; One is
hungry, the other well fed, But thieves all four are we.
-
- One is a pickpocket, The second a pimp, a handsome
fellow; One is a hijacker on the lookout for packages, And I am a
house thief.
-
- A pimp is common, As all agree: From his own wife,
He gets the disease To be a hijacker is bitter: You can rupture your
lung, It's hard to earn something with some of the packages, The best
thing is to be a house thief." [RUBIN, R., 1979]
-
- "In an age of pandemic anti-Semitism," says Bristow,
"a Jewish pimp was a political as well as a social force," [BRISTOW,
p. 4] very emotionally reinforcing anti-Jewish sentiments of the day.
Jews were already blamed in central Europe for a financial crash in
1873 and economic competition between Jews and non-Jews was
heightening.
-
- A young and enraged Adolf Hitler paid particular
attention to the highly visible phenomenon of Jewish street hustling
and prostitution rings in Vienna, and was incensed that many
non-Jewish women were coerced into the largely Jewish-run trade. "In
no other city of Western Europe," he wrote in Mein Kampf, "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." [BRISTOW, p. 84]
-
- The Jewish prostitution business extended from
Europe across the world, where it sometimes overlapped with French,
Italian, Chinese, and other rings. In the Punjabi (Indian) capital of
Lahore, "Jewish pimps were in the habit of leaving their women
penniless only to reappear after workers had accumulated some money."
[BRISTOW, p. 195] In Rio de Janeiro Jewish immigrants from Russia,
Poland, Hungary, and Romania were so much identified with prostitution
in the late 1800's that "the kaftan, a Jew's traditional long gown,
became synonymous with pimp." [BRISTOW, p. 113]
-
- Thirty-nine Jews were expelled from Brazil in 1879
for soliciting women for prostitution and running illegal whorehouses.
[BRISTOW, p. 114] Of 199 licensed whorehouses in Buenos Aires in 1909,
102 were run by Jews and more than half the prostitutes were Jewish.
[FRIED, p. 71] 4,248 Jewish women were registered for licensed
brothels in Buenos Aires between 1880-1913, and those represented only
the licensed ones. Edward Bristow estimates that 9,000 Jewish women
immigrants came to Brazil in a 25-year span in that era as prostitutes
(many were no doubt highly transient), when the total Jewish
population of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay combined amounted to less
than 60,000 people in 1910. [BRISTOW, p. 119]
-
- In 1889, the Buenos Aires Bulletin Continental
reported that 200 German/Austrian women were held against their will
by Jewish pimps from Poland. [GUY, p. 5] "Jewish procurers," says
Donna Guy,
-
- "... became an organized ring in major cities all
over the world. They were particularly powerful in the Argentine port
cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario ... [GUY, p. 10] ...
Turn-of-the-century reports by the Hamburg B'nai B'rith [a Jewish
fraternal organization] concluded that most prostitutes in Buenos
Aires were Jewish and that traffickers 'dress with ostentatious
elegance, wear large diamonds, go to the theatre or opera daily; they
have their own clubs and organizations where wares are sorted,
auctioned, and sold ... They have their own secret wireless code, are
well organized, and-- heavens! -- in South America everything is
possible." [GUY, p. 19]
-
- "Pooling their financial resources in a kind of
guild," notes another Jewish scholar, Howard Sachar,
-
- "the [Polish Jewish] newcomers [to Argentina] in
1909 controlled slightly more than half the nearly two hundred
licensed brothels in Buenos Aires. Jewish women served as their
madams, and Jewish immigrant girls often were recruited and lured into
their hands as prostitutes." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 283]
-
- In Cuba, Jews "became engaged in the 'White Slave
Trade,'" says Robert Levine, "importing prostitutes -- some Jewish --
from Poland ... Many women recruited to the business had been trapped
in the Russian and Polish Pale and throughout the Hapsburg Empire by
force or fraud, and the human dilemma was great." [LEVINE, p.
66]
-
- Incredibly, even in Germany, where Jews have such a
horrible history, such Jewish-related problems still bubble beneath
the surface. In 1994 a US News and World Report reporter noted the
observations of a Frankfort policeman patrolling Precinct 4:
-
- "'It's all owned by Jews,' [Bernd] Gayk says of the
train station's red light district. 'Practically everything in this
area is owned by German Jews. There is a single cabaret here owned by
a German, but the rest belongs to the Jews.'" [MARKS, J., p. 42,
44]
-
- Shockingly, even shortly after the Holocaust when
there were only a few thousand Jews left in Germany, they remained
prominent in the prostitution business there. In 1961 Rabbi Richard L.
Rubenstein interviewed Dean Heinrich Gruber of the Evangelical Church
of East and West Berlin. Rubenstein notes that Gruber nearly himself
perished in a Nazi concentration camp, and he "had a long and heroic
record of opposition to the Nazis on Christian grounds as well as
friendship and succor for Nazism's chief victims [Jews]." [RUBENSTEIN,
p. 5] "The problem in Germany is that the Jews haven't learned
anything from what happened to them," the Dean told a startled
Rubenstein, "I always tell my Jewish friends that they shouldn't put a
hindrance in the way our fight against anti-Semitism." [RUBENSTEIN, p.
7] Gruber then complained that "many of the brothels and risqué night
clubs, for example, were in Jewish hands, especially those in close
proximity to army camps." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 7] And Rubenstein's response
to the clergyman? "Look," the rabbi said,
-
- "I don't understand why you are so troubled about a
pitifully small number of Jews in shady positions or interested in
making money rather than following more edifying pursuits. It seems to
me that every person pays a price for the kind of life he or she
leads. Why should Germany be upset about a few such Jews unless they
are overly involved in other peoples' lives? Must every Jew make
himself so pale, so inconspicuous, even invisible, that he will give
no offense to Germans? ... After what happened [the Holocaust], why
should any Jew remain and worry about German approval?" [RUBENSTEIN,
p. 7-8]
-
- Marvin Wolf, a Jewish captain in the U.S. army
serving in Germany, recalls that in 1971
-
- "Rabbi David, the Jewish chaplain in Frankfort am
Main -- and the husband of my mother's second cousin -- told me that
he knew several Jewish millionaires at whose homes I would be welcome
-- but, 'I'm not crazy about any of them,' he said. 'What do you
mean?' I asked. 'After the war, '45, '46, Germany was in ruins,' he
explained. 'Terrible times. Nobody had money except the Occupation
forces and a handful of Jews who had survived the camps and got a
monthly pension -- government reparations. In Frankfort, a few of
these Jews recruited starving, desperate German girls and opened
brothels. Got their revenge, and got rich, too. They're in other
businesses now, but do you really want to spend Pesach [Passover] with
such people?" [WOLF, M. J., 1998]
-
- In 1909 one Jewish observer, Marcus Braun, estimated
there to be 50,000 Jewish immigrant prostitutes in America and 10,000
pimps. (Edward Bristow considers these figures grossly inflated, but
notes that one of Braun's colleagues, echoing at least public feelings
about the problem, thought there were up to 100,000 American Jewish
women of ill repute.) In any case, the Jewish pimps of New York City
(who owned many of the "so-called French" bordellos in the Tenderloin
district and "sought to fill them with French prostitutes from
abroad") [BRISTOL, p. 165] had their own official organization: "The
New York Independent Benevolent Association." Frances Kellar, a
respected social worker, wrote in 1907 that "the two nationalities who
may be said to be central to the disorderly house business in New York
[are] French and Jewish ... French houses ... are not ... to be so
much feared as the Jewish ... [which are] thoroughly vicious and bad."
[BRISTOL, p. 165] By the turn of the century, "hundreds and hundreds"
of Jewish women walked the Lower East Side of New York City as
prostitutes. [FRIED, p. 8] Benjamin Altman described the whores he saw
on Allen Street: "A hundred women on every ... corner. Tall women,
short women. Fair women. Ugly women." [FRIED, p. 12]
-
- Between November 15, 1908 and March 15, 1909, almost
three-quarters of 2,093 prostitute cases before the New York City
courts were "native-born" women, "a preponderance," noted Albert
Fried, "who were presumably Jewish." (Ethnic categories included
"Russian" and "Polish," but not Jewish). [FRIED, p. 8] Of
"foreign-born" prostitutes in court, 225 were Jewish, 154 French, 64
German, 31 Italian, 29 Irish, and 10 Polish. [FRIED, p. 8]
-
- "The Jewish pimp," says Albert Fried, "freely used
marriage brokers and unemployment agencies to snare his victims -- the
young, the lonely, the innocent, the weak, the alienated, the
oppressed." [FRIED, p. 14] Starting out with one whore in 1890, for
example, by 1912 Motche Greenberg had a "controlling interest in eight
whorehouses and 114 women and was earning $4,000 a month, an
incalculable amount by today's standards." [FRIED, p. 18]
-
- In Chicago, by 1907 Rabbi Emil Hirsch declared that
75% of the "white slavery" in his city was controlled by Jews.
[BRISTOW, p. 177] The Jewish periodical the Forward forlornly reported
that "the facts that were uncovered at the trial [for corruption] of
[police] inspector McCann are horrifying. 75% of the white slave trade
in Chicago is in Jewish hands. The owners of most of the immoral
resorts on the West Side are Jews. Even in Gentile neighborhoods Jews
stand out prominently in the nefarious business." [FRIED, p.
70]
-
- (Even in 2001, as a result of an undercover police
investigation, Joel Gordon (a cantor, i.e., the man who sings
liturgical songs and leads prayer in a synagogue) and his wife Alison
Greenberg were tried in Chicago for running a brothel. Ginsberg was
also charged with acts of prostitution. "We now realize," said Howard
Peritz, a member of Gordon's synagogue, "that in starting a
congregation around a man [Gordon], we were canonizing him." [JEWISH
TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY, 1-5-01] The same year, a synagogue room (Finchley
Synagogue's Kinloss Suite) in Great Britain made the news when it
hosted a "stag party with three strippers performing 'sexually
explicit acts.'" Some of the money raised was supposed to go to a
Jewish charity.) [ZERDIN, J., 29-01]
-
- In 1987, a Jewish ultra-Orthodox group bought a
slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, and began hiring illegal non-Jewish
aliens from Eastern Europe to do the menial jobs at their company.
Despite the fact that only Jews dominated the upper eschelons of the
firm, and Jewish author Stephen Bloom's underscores Jewish
exploitation and condemnation of the entire non-Jewish community in
his book called Postville, he frames the following in cautiously
distancing, apologetic form:
-
- "[A woman in her mid-twenties said:] 'The managers
are incredibly rude. One manager fired me because I wouldn't go to bed
with him.' The translator used the word 'manager,' but the woman was
most likely speaking of one of her supervisors, who would have been a
Christian. 'If the manager wants to sleep with you and you do, you get
a raise. If you don't, he makes your life miserable. Girls have no
choice.' No one [of a group of fellow workers] disputed what the woman
said." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 138]
-
- In 1932, a few Polish-American officials of the city
of Hamtramck (within Detroit) were charged by a grand jury with the
"familiar charge of collusion with vice interests for gratuities." The
central player among those convicted was Jewish, Jacob Kaplan, "head
of a vice syndicate" who collected $2,000 a month from disorderly
houses in the Syndicate." [WOOD, 1955, p. 53-54] In 1941, the Detroit
Free Press listed the names of those involved in another exposed vice
ring in the area of Hamtramck, a ring that drew city officials and
administrators into its web with bribes and payoffs. The racketeers
included "Sam (the Jap) Gross, Hamtramck area brothel operator;"
Charles Berman, "charged with operating a vice resort;" Irene Kaplan,
"defendant in accusations as brothel keeper;" Ike (Forty Grand) Levy,
"vice resort operator;" Kitty (Big Nose) Silverman, "reputed vice
resort keeper;" and Jack (alias Jack Jesus) Silverman, "husband of
Kitty." [WOOD, A., 1955, p. 84, 86]
-
- Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway notes the dimensions
of Detroit's all-Jewish Prohibition-era Purple Gang:
-
- "Detroit's Canadian border and existence of
Jewish-owned Canadian distilleries, such as those of Sam and Harry
Bronfman [Jewish founders of Seagram], offered opportunities to
Detroit's Jewish gangsters that rivaled bootlegging operations in
Chicago and New York. Instead of transporting the liquor themselves,
the Purples arranged for the Jewish-dominated 'Little Jewish Navy' to
bring it across the river for them ... The Gang's dealings also
extended to the sale of stolen diamonds, narcotics and prostitution in
Canada." [ROCKAWAY, R., 2001, p. 113-]
-
- Green Bay, Wisconsin? George Tane, also Jewish, "was
a bootlegger who controlled Green Bay, Wisconsin. After Prohibition,
he owned all the houses of prostitution in the city." [ROCKAWAY, R.,
1993, p. 214] Atlanta, Georgia? In 2001, Steven Kaplan, owner of the
nude "Gold Club," faced a Federal indictment on counts of "loan
sharking, money laundering and bribing police officers." He was also
accused "of building a $50 million fortune in part by providing
prostitutes for celebrities ... Atlanta's Gold Club is one of the most
profitable nude clubs in the country." [COURT TV, 4-30-2001] [See also
evidence in this volume -- Mass Media 2 Chapter -- about prostitution
rackets controlled by today's "Russian" mafia, which is largely Jewish
in organization; Heidi Fleiss (the much-publicized, high-priced Jewish
prostitution "madam" to Hollywood stars), famed Jewish prostitute
Xaviera Hollander ("The Happy Hooker"), and details of enormous Jewish
influence in the worlds of "smut" and pornography]
-
- With the American public beginning to note the high
Jewish representation in the prostitution trade; some journalists
implied wider corruption. In the June 1909 issue of McClure's
magazine, for instance, George Kibbe Turner wrote:
-
- "Out of the Bowery and Red Light districts have come
the new development in New York politics -- the great voting power of
the organized criminals. It was a notable development not only for New
York, but for the country at large. And no part of it was more
noteworthy than the appearance of the Jewish dealer in women, a
product of New York politics, who has vitiated more than any other
single agency the moral life of the great cities of America in the
past ten years." [BELL, p. 187]
-
- "It is an absolute fact," wrote Ernest Bell in his
1911 book about white slavery, "that corrupt Jews are now the backbone
of the loathsome traffic in New York and Chicago. The good Jews know
this and feel keenly the unspeakable shame of it." [BELL, p. 188] "The
criminal instincts that are so often found naturally in the Russian
and Polish Jew," wrote Frank Moss in a popular volume called American
Metropolis (1897), "come to the surface in such ways as to warrant the
opinion that these people are the worst element in the entire make-up
of New York City ... A large proportion of the people of New Israel
are addicted to vice." [FRIED, p. 55-56]
-
- "Vice and crime did pervade the Lower East Side,"
remarks Albert Fried, "and no one knew it more keenly than its
residents. The better part of wisdom, so far as they were concerned,
was to keep the disgrace quiet, to avoid publicizing it." [FRIED, p.
59] Meanwhile, in the early 1900's the National Council of Jewish
Women even had Yiddish-speaking volunteers working to keep new female
immigrants at Ellis Island "out of the clutches of men (often Jewish)
who would try to entice them into prostitution." [SCHNEIDER, p.
224]
-
- By the early years of the twentieth century, large
urban department stores had reputations "as breeding grounds for
prostitution." In New York City, for example, Macy's fell under
suspicion to some, in part for its proximity to a former red light
district. In 1913, Percy Strauss, the Vice President of Macy's, hosted
a "vice vigilante" group to investigate his store. "Strauss," notes
William Leach, "no dour Puritan, had a personal interest in leading a
campaign against vice. For one thing, as a German Jew and spokesman
for the Jewish community, he had to disprove the charge -- widely made
-- that immigrant Jewish women (and many of his own employees,
therefore) were more likely than other women to be prostitutes."
[LEACH, p. 117] By 1915 the Committee Against Vice (of which Strauss
had conveniently become chairman) published a report that affirmed
that Macy's was "normal." "On the other hand," says William Leach,
"testimony in the 'secret reports' told a different tale. Saleswomen,
it was revealed, passed around pornographic cards and poems about
themselves, talked openly about 'sex' and 'sex desire,' and 'gossiped
about fairies,' as one investigator put it. Private accounts by other
investigative reformers echoed this view, that things at Macy's and in
other department stores were hardly 'normal' or 'decent.' 'The
strongest temptation of girls in department stores,' warned one
reformer, 'is not poverty but luxury and money.'" [LEACH, p.
118]
-
- Although Jewish poverty was -- and is -- often
argued as a major reason for their high international representation
in such a vice, a 1914 League of Nations survey of 25 Jewish
prostitutes in Buenos Aires showed that only 4 of them claimed to be
poor before their new trade. Nine, however, stated that their family
lives had been "immoral or abusive in some way." [BRISTOW, p. 95] (As
Robert Rockaway notes about the dozens of members in Detroit's
all-Jewish criminal Purple Gang, which was involved in everything from
murder to prostitution: "[Purple Gang members] were not products of
crushing poverty, broken homes, or widespread economic despair. Most
of them had been raised in lower middle class households where the
father had a steady, if not well-paying, job.") [ROCKAWAY, R., 2001,
p. 113-]
-
- And what, in complete dismissal of the facts of
history, is the common Jewish perspective about the unabashed
prominence of Jews in the "white slave trade?" This, in 1998, from
Jewish scholar Gary Tobin in a popular Jewish newspaper:
-
- "For those with a knowledge of history of 19th
century anti-Semitic propaganda, the idea that Jews are running "the
white slave trade" is nothing new. Cartoon like stereotypes of
loathsome Jewish villains trading on the lost virtue of non-Jewish
maidens was standard material for the Nazis and their precursors ...
It took a sick mind to imagine that Jews were running the world's
oldest profession." [TOBIN, Distinguished, p. 51]
-
- Tobin was responding to a very disturbing article in
the New York Times (January 11, 1998) which described the horrible
situation that Slavic Gentile prostitutes face today, trapped in
Israel. As the Times notes, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and
a resulting economic chaos, literally hundreds of thousands of Russian
and Ukrainian women have been dispersed throughout the world, most
entrapped in an international prostitution trade run by the "Russian
mafia." (Although it is certainly inferred, what the Times article
does not overtly mention is that a significant part of the Russian
mafia is Jewish. See later chapter). Glenn Frankel, however, a
Washington Post correspondent in Jerusalem, took the perspective in
1994 that "there was much talk about the Russian mafia muscling in [to
Israel], although the police and most crime experts agreed that the
brothels were almost entirely under the control of the Israeli mafia
and that the Russians worked mostly as low-level managers or hookers."
[FRANKEL, p. 175]
-
- "Israel has become a routine destination for the
global trafficking of women," noted Leonard Fein in a 1998 Jewish
Bulletin,
-
- "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 ... Some [are] as
young as 15, and even 12 ... Each woman earns between $50,000 and
$100,000 for her pimp. The turnover of the prostitution trade in
Israel comes to some $450 million a year." [FEIN, 1998, p. 21]
-
- In a country of six million people, this averages
about $75 a year paid to a pimp for every man, woman, and child in
Israel. There are today 150 brothels and sex shops in Tel Aviv alone.
[SILVER, E., 8-25-2000, p. 32]
-
- In an interview with Marina, a Russian prostitute,
the (Jewish) Forward noted in 1995 that there were nine or ten
"Russian" prostitution rings in Israel. "Girls are regularly beaten to
keep them obedient," Marina told the Forward, "... [The Israeli police
are] regularly paid off with free visits to our girls. A reporter like
you thinks you're picking up a stone from the road, but you might find
you're digging into a mountain." [SHILLING, p. 5] As a report by
Israel's Women's Network noted in 1997:
-
- "Every year, hundreds of women from the former
Soviet Union are lured to Israel, gaining entry by posing as
immigrants, on the promise of finding lucrative jobs, and then are
lured into prostitution by abusive pimps." [GROSS, N., 1997, p.
16]
-
- In 1998, Hungary's Consul in Tel Aviv, Andrea
Horvath complained that four Hungarian women "had allegedly met their
Israeli employer in a Budapest discotheque. They were hired as dancers
but were later forced to provide sexual services as well." [MTI,
3-20-98] In 2000, Robert Friedman, in talking about his book about the
"Russian Mafia," noted Seimon Mogilevich, head of a major Jewish
mobster network, noting him as "one of the world's biggest traffickers
in women, Eurasian women." [PENKLAVA, M., 5-3-2000]
-
- "Women are sold into the sex business in Israel for
between $5,000 and $15,000," reported the Jerusalem Post in 1998,
"while the pimps who buy them can earn between $10,000 and $50,000 a
year per woman ... 2,000 women are brought to Israel from the CIS and
forced by pimps to work as prostitutes. Many are brought here on false
pretenses and held against their will." As Ira Omait, head of the
Haifa Emergency Shelter for Women told the Post, "We are fast heading
in the direction of trade in minors for prostitution and slavery."
[COLLINS, L., 12-15-98, p. 5] Incredibly, as noted in a Jerusalem Post
editorial in 1998, "According to the Women's Lobby [a women's group in
Israel], part of the [prostitution] problem is that there is no law
against slavery in Israel." [JERUSALEM POST, 1-13-98, p. 10]
-
- "Poor Women of Ex-Soviet Union Lured Into Sex
Slavery" headlined a 1998 Associated Press story. Women forced into
prostitution in Israel, noted the article, were locked in rooms and
provided only food and condoms. And Israeli law on the subject? In
1996 150 men were arrested for pimping or running brothels. Merely 21
cases went to trial, and no one was ever convicted of a crime.
[LINZER, D., 6-13-98] In 1998 an Israeli judge even ordered an
insurance company to pay for a client's prostitution addiction:
-
- "An Israeli insurance company has been ordered to
pay 300,000 shekels ($80,000) to fund the prostitution habit of a man
injured in a car accident." [DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, 4-22-98]
-
- The man claimed that since a 1993 car crash he
couldn't form relationships with women and relied on the prostitution
world.
-
- The 1998 New York Times article noted that more than
1,500 Slavic prostitutes -- mostly from the Ukraine -- have been
deported from Israel for residence infractions in the past three
years. (Israeli oppression knows no end: "Unlike many countries,
Israel does not pay airfare for deportees." [LINZER, D., 6-13-98])
Prostitution is not illegal in Israel and clients include foreign
workers, "Israeli soldiers with rifles on their shoulders," business
executives, and tourists. The Times noted that
-
- "The networks trafficking women run east to Japan
and Thailand, where thousands of young Slavic women now work against
their will as prostitutes, and west to the Adriatic Coast and beyond
... The routes are controlled by Russian gangs based in Moscow ... In
Ukraine alone ... as many as 400,000 women under 30 have gone in the
past decade ... Israel is a fairly typical destination ... Police
officials [in Israel] estimate that there are 25,000 paid sexual
transactions every day. [This in a country with a population of 6
million]. Brothels are ubiquitous ... Once they cross the border [into
Israel] their passports will be confiscated [by pimps], their freedoms
curtailed and what little money they have taken from them at once ...
The Tropicana, in Tel Aviv's bustling business district, is one of the
busiest bordellos. The women who work there, like nearly all
prostitutes in Israel today, are Russian. Their bosses, however, are
not. 'Israelis love Russian girls,' said Jacob Golan, who owns this
and two other clubs, '.... They are blonde and good looking and
different than us ... And they are desperate. They are ready to do
anything for money." [SPECTER, p. 1]
-
- "The situation," wrote Jewish author David Weinberg
in an 1998 article about prostitution in Israel entitled Not So Holy
Land, "is enough to make you cry in despair, or vomit from shame."
[WEINBERG, D., 1-18-98, p. 8]
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- http://www.jewishtribalreview.org/10whsla.htm
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