Uncategorized
Condoms and tikkun olam: An Orthodox woman strives to aid sex workers in Prague
PRAGUE (JTA) — Not long after she puts away her silver Shabbat candlesticks and home-baked challah, Yael Schoultz walks through a cavernous hallway, and up a set of gray concrete stairs. Past a door, she finds a group of heavily made-up women in red and black G-strings and spike heels, listlessly beckoning men for sex in return for cash.
Schoultz, 43, spotted about 30 women at the Prague brothel floating from room to room in various states of undress — negligees, see-through bras — with accents as varied as their lipstick shades. Some are smiling, some appear bored as they play games on their phones, others are trying to woo potential clients with a simple, “Come have a good time, come to my room.”
It’s a typical Saturday night post-Shabbat routine for Schoultz, an Orthodox Jewish South African who recently launched L’Chaim, an organization dedicated to helping sex workers in the Czech Republic.
Schoultz and her colleagues engage the women with friendly banter about health and the weather, careful not to interrupt those with customers. The L’Chaim volunteers collectively carry a few hundred free condoms along with high-end soaps and hand-crafted bracelets.
“The girls always ask for extras for their friends,” Schoultz said.
Schoultz, who has been visiting Czech brothels since she moved to Prague in 2011, is not a mere purveyor of gifts. Her goal is to establish a rapport with the women she meets so that they can leave the business of sex work if they so wish. And her Jewish faith is a core driver of Schoultz’s quest to provide a better life for the sex workers.
“Some of the women have been trafficked,” she explained, referring to the term governments and human rights advocates use to describe a contemporary form of slavery. “There are girls who were tied up for days and raped, even by the police. Some might seem to be in the brothel voluntarily, but not really, because they owe a lot of money on a debt and feel sex work is only way they can pay it back.”
Dressed in black from head to toe, in what a fashion magazine might describe as modest goth, Schoultz is a veteran of global anti-trafficking efforts. A few decades ago, while teaching English in South Korea, Schoultz volunteered for an organization that was trying to stop the trafficking of North Korean women to China. At the same time, she was getting a master’s in theology and wanted to move to Europe to get her doctorate, which was possible at Prague’s Charles University.
“When I got to the Czech Republic, I started looking for people who were working on the trafficking issue and found three women: a Catholic nun and two Protestant missionaries. All of them were in their 60s,” Schoultz said.
Schoultz asked if she could join them in their visits to brothels.
“I just went in and started talking to women, about really anything. Language wasn’t a barrier because most sex workers speak English,” she recalled. “But it was a bit weird walking into these places with a nun in full habit.”
After a few months Schoultz began to feel uncomfortable — not with the sex workers, but with her philanthropic colleagues’ proselytizing and “religious agenda.”
“I wasn’t interested in giving out Virgin Mary medallions,” she said.
Schoultz, who teaches English at an international school in Prague, started her own informal volunteer group to help sex workers in 2012, while also embarking on a deeply personal Jewish journey.
Although she believes her father has “Jewish ancestry,” Schoultz was brought up in a Protestant home. Still, she long maintained a deep interest and connection to Judaism which intensified when she pursued her studies in theology. For several years, she regularly attended Orthodox services at 13th-century Old New Synagogue and volunteered for the Prague Jewish Community’s social services department before completing an Orthodox conversion in 2020 with Israeli rabbi David Bohbot. She has now begun her master’s degree in Jewish Studies at the Ashkenazium in Budapest, a division of the secular Milton Friedman University operated by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
“From the beginning when I knew I wanted to make the conversion, Orthodox Judaism was something I agreed with theologically, it is where I felt most comfortable,” said Shoultz, who describes herself as Modern Orthodox.
Rabbi Dohbot praised Schoultz’s dedication. “This work she does is noble, and isn’t that what most big religions are based on? Showing love and respect for others?” he said.
Schoultz completed an Orthodox conversion to Judaism in 2020. (Courtesy of Schoultz)
Last year, Schoultz achieved another transitional milestone: obtaining Czech government recognition of L’Chaim as a registered nonprofit.
Although L’Chaim is a secular organization, Schoultz sees her work through the lens of tikkun olam, the rabbinical command to repair the world.
“I feel like as a Jewish person, you’re supposed to bring light to the world,” said Schoultz. “And the sex industry is very dark, because even if you choose to be a sex worker, it’s not a job that anybody really enjoys as the customers are often drunk or abusive.”
“It might sound strange, but I feel very connected to Hashem when I am in the brothel, because he is there for me, and for these women too,” she added, using the preferred Orthodox Hebrew term for god.
Schoultz’s co-volunteers, who are mostly not Jewish, are aware of her commitment to the faith.
“After Yael started getting serious about Judaism, she found her path, she was more complete and found her purpose,” said Natalia Synelnykova, who worked with Schoultz to launch L’Chaim. “Everyone would say that their friends are unique, but I have rarely met someone who is so human-centered as Yael, and that is definitely linked to how she sees Judaism.”
Schoultz named her new organization L’Chaim — to life, in Hebrew — as a message to those she seeks to help.
“We want the women in the brothels to have a life because a lot of them feel like they don’t have any life, like they’re barely making it,” she said.
There are about 100 brothels in Prague, according to media reports, and roughly 13,0000 sex workers in the Czech Republic, of which about half are thought to be single mothers. Although sex work is legal, pimping is not, so the brothels operate in a murky legal area that legislators have been trying to address for decades.
Once a hotspot for human trafficking, today the Czech Republic has a relatively low rate of human sex slavery according to government statistics. But Schoultz said the numbers are misleading.
“No one really knows how many trafficked women there are in the country,” she said.
A U.S. State Department report praised the Czech Republic’s efforts to limit trafficking but also noted that the country is more focused on prosecutions of criminals rather than on helping victims. Their stories stay with Schoultz.
“I meet many Nigerian women who may not be locked up in a room, but they are locked up by Juju,” she said, referring to a form of “black magic” that some Nigerian traffickers reportedly use to scare women into prostitution.
She also counsels “Romanian girls who are initially romanced by men that turn out to be traffickers.” A man will have many women he calls “wives,” and each one has a baby with him, “The women give him all their money to support the baby who he keeps as a form of collateral in Romania,” Schoultz said.
(Shoultz turned down JTA’s request for contacts of sex workers she has helped, noting that this would violate L’Chaim’s promise of confidentiality).
The Czech Republic’s leading anti-trafficking organization, La Strada, takes a different orientation towards sex work than L’Chaim, focusing on it more as a legitimate profession that should be organized and regulated.
“We believe women are fully able to decide for themselves if they want to be sex workers and our goal is to provide safety for those who do so, to help them organize, fight stigma and have the rights of all other workers,” said Marketa Hronkova, La Strada’s director. La Strada defines trafficking strictly as those who are physically coerced or blackmailed into providing labor.
Hronkova said there are many sex workers who choose their profession willingly and that it is patronizing and often damaging when those who say they want to help focus exclusively on “pushing women to exit a path they have chosen, as if they have no minds of their own.”
The alternative to sex work, for a single mother, can often put her in an even worse financial situation, she noted. “Our goal is to make sex work safe, not to get women to stop doing it,” said Hromkova.
Concerning L’Chaim, she said as long as its aim was listening to women, and not making them feel ashamed, it could be helpful. La Strada already cooperates with another Czech organization, Pleasure Without Risk, which maintains a neutral stance towards sex work and provides women with access to testing for sexually transmitted diseases as well as counseling.
L’Chaim’s goal, Schoultz explained, is to identify who might be trafficked and provide them with the confidence and practical resources to rebuild their lives. But since getting access to the women requires earning the trust of brothel owners and managers, L’Chaim doesn’t advertise itself as an anti-trafficking group.
“We show up as providing support to women in prostitution, that gets us in the door,” she reflected. L’Chaim has about a dozen volunteers.
It can take Schoultz six months of relationship building before she finds out what brought the client into sex work.
“We start by talking about her kids, talking about her dogs,” said Schoultz “and eventually their stories come out, many involving abuse, trauma and mental health problems.”
She estimated that at the 13 or so brothels she regularly visits in Prague and Brno, at least half the sex workers were not there on a fully voluntary basis.
In the future, Schoultz hopes to create trafficking awareness campaigns and help the customers of sex workers recognize the signs that a woman is working against her will.
The brothel owners are not always pleasant to deal with, Scholtz acknowledged.
“At one place an owner came behind me and kissed my neck on the back of my neck. It was really creepy,” she said.
And despite her modest dress, or tznius, in keeping with her Orthodox values, she said she was pursued by a brothel customer to participate in “group sex.” She fended him off calmly by explaining that she “offered services, but not those kinds of services.”
—
The post Condoms and tikkun olam: An Orthodox woman strives to aid sex workers in Prague appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
BBC draws fire after airing Holocaust cello repair story that does not specially mention Jews
(JTA) — In a Christmas special this year, a BBC One program devoted a quarter of its episode to telling the story of a Jewish child refugee whose cello was damaged while fleeing the Nazis on the Kindertransport.
But while the story itself is steeped in Jewish history, the segment of the program failed to make any mention of Jews, igniting criticism from British Jews who are on high alert for signs of antisemitism from the network.
Now, the BBC has issued a clarification, adding a note to the program description in its iPlayer app explaining that the Kindertransport evacuated Jewish children from Nazi territory.
The production company behind “The Repair Shop,” a popular show where family heirlooms are refurbished, said it believed the historical context of Martin Landau’s cello would be obvious to viewers when Helen Mirren, the famed actress who recently portrayed the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, brought it in during the episode that aired Dec. 26.
“We were honoured to share the history of Martin Landau’s cello and play a small part in telling an important and emotive story with contemporary resonance,” a Ricochet spokesperson said in a statement. “We felt that Martin’s story was told clearly and succinctly, and we believed the fact that he was Jewish was implicit in the story.”
Born in Berlin in 1924, Landau — who later became a prominent theater director — was 14 when he brought his cello with him on board the Kindertransport, a rescue effort that brought nearly 10,000, mostly Jewish, children to safety in Europe during World War II.
But before getting on the train, the neck of Landau’s instrument was “deliberately snapped in two,” according to a description of the episode on the BBC website.
“Despite this blow, Martin guarded the cello carefully for the remainder of his life, eventually gifting it to Denville Hall, a care home for retired members of the entertainment industries, of which both he and Dame Helen are loyal supporters,” the episode’s description continues. “Sadly, the cello has remained silent for over 80 years, and the residents would dearly love to see it restored so that they can hear it played for the first time.”
Thirty-one members of Landau’s family, including his parents, were killed in Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz, according to his obituary in The Times. In London, Landau went on to become a prolific producer of plays and musicals. He died in 2011 at 86.
The Jewish Chronicle was first to report frustration over the show’s lack of explicit mention of Landau’s Jewish identity. It reported that a reference to Jews appeared to be truncated from a sentence by Mirren, who said, “…children were put on the Kindertransport.”
The episode is one of several antisemitism and Israel-related controversies to hit the British public broadcaster in recent months. In October, the BBC was penalized after it failed to identify the narrator of a Gaza documentary as the son of a Hamas government official. Over the summer, it was also criticized for airing a performance by the punk group Bob Vylan that included chants of “Death to the IDF.”
On Saturday, the BBC also reached a settlement with an Israeli family whose home it filmed following the Oct. 7 attacks without consent.
Now, the network has added new language to the “The Repair Shop” episode, too.
“This program is subject to a clarification. The Kindertransport was the organized evacuation of approximately 10,000 children, the majority of whom were Jewish, from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia,” the iPlayer description read. (The initiative was funded largely by Jewish groups, but a small number of the children rescued were Roma, Christian children of Jewish parents or the children of political prisoners.)
During the episode, the repaired instrument was played by the British Jewish cellist Raphael Wallfisch, whose 100-year-old mother Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is the only surviving member of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DSE4luvCGya/?hl=en
The post BBC draws fire after airing Holocaust cello repair story that does not specially mention Jews appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
At a former driving school, Kehillat Harlem plants roots for Jewish life uptown
(New York Jewish Week) — The “Yes You Can” driving school is no more, but the sign that still hangs over its former storefront in Central Harlem is something of an apt message for the new tenant — a fledgling synagogue that aims to demonstrate the vitality of Jewish life in the neighborhood.
Kehillat Harlem, a non-denominational “shul community,” moved into the Adam Clayton Powell storefront last year after seven years in transit. Since its founding, it has held services in a basement, a local cafe and even outdoors.
Now, Kehillat Harlem is using the space for what its founding rabbi, Kyle Savitch, says is the only option for weekly Shabbat services in the neighborhood, even as a host of new initiatives aim to serve Harlem’s growing Jewish population.
“We’re the only synagogue in Central Harlem that’s meeting every Friday, every Saturday, let alone having meals and everything else, so I definitely think we’re serving a need there,” Savitch said. “For folks who are looking to move or looking to join a new community, sometimes what they want to know is that there is consistency in Jewish life, and so I think we’re able to provide that.”
But Kehillat Harlem isn’t just striving to add a synagogue to the neighborhood. Savitch also aims to leverage the shul into a community hub or even, one day, a restaurant serving Jewish food.
A dress rehearsal came last month on the first night of Hanukkah, when roughly 70 people filled Kehillat Harlem’s storefront space for the shul’s annual Hanukkah speakeasy. To enter the event, which included a jazz band, latkes and kosher tequila from Tekiah Spirits, partygoers used the secret password “Lehadlik ner,” the Hebrew phrase meaning “to light a candle.”
“We’re exploring how our role in the community can expand to infrastructure in terms of kosher food, in terms of space access, in terms of places to gather,” Savitch said.
Kehillat Harlem is hardly the only entity to tackle those questions in Harlem, which once had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. Once home to roughly 175,000 Jewish residents at its peak in 1917, the neighborhood saw most of them leave as it transformed into a hub of Black culture during the Harlem Renaissance. Some of the neighborhood’s synagogues remain standing, but have been converted into churches.
Over the last 15 years, the neighborhood’s Jewish population has gone from an estimated 2,000 people to 16,000 adults and 8,000 children, according to a 2023 study by the UJA-Federation of New York.
To serve them, a branch of the young professional programming nonprofit Moishe House has opened up, as has a branch of the Upper West Side’s Marlene Meyerson JCC with its own rabbi-in-residence and monthly Shabbat service. Tzibur Harlem, an initiative founded in 2024 by Rabbi Dimitry Ekshtut and Erica Frankel, offers programming including occasional Shabbat services; it recently played a role in getting a Hanukkah menorah added to a local Christmas display.
But when it comes to regular prayer services, the only option until Kehillat Harlem opened was the Old Broadway Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation founded in 1911 that serves families in West Harlem and Morningside Heights.
Many observant Jews in the neighborhood were looking for something different, said Savitch, who was ordained at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a liberal Orthodox seminary, in 2021.
Kehillat Harlem, he said, “came out of the need for a Jewish community in the neighborhood, which was inclusive and welcoming to everyone who walked in the door. Our community is very diverse. There’s folks who are observant, there’s folks who aren’t observant, there’s queer folks, there’s folks in interfaith relationships, and there wasn’t really a place in the neighborhood for all those people to go and feel comfortable.”
Arielle Flax, a 32-year-old Jewish Harlem resident and co-president of Kehillat Harlem, described the shul’s ethos as “socially progressive but halachically traditional,” meaning that she seeks to follow Jewish law.
While Kehillat Harlem has a mechitza, the gender partition that separates men and women in Orthodox synagogues, it also has a third section for genderfluid or nonbinary participants. Unlike at most Orthodox synagogues, where reading from the Torah is restricted to men, people of all genders are invited to read from the Torah.
“We want to be as inclusive as possible, while still keeping that bar for those who do want to fulfill the more stricter obligations for Judaism,” said Flax. “We try to empower people of all genders, all backgrounds, to participate, to feel like they are contributing and involved and not just spectating.”
Before Flax joined Kehillat Harlem in 2017 for its inaugural Shabbat, she had hesitated to move to the neighborhood because of its sparse Jewish infrastructure, but the presence of the fledgling congregation had helped tip her decision.
“I immediately felt like I had a place to go as soon as I moved up to New York, which is great, but before we moved up we were a little concerned,” said Flax.
Since then, Flax said she had seen the neighborhood’s Jewish population grow.
“I think by having Kehillat Harlem and other organizations in the area, I think more Jewish people are kind of coming out and getting involved in Jewish life in Harlem,” she said. “I think that’s a really beautiful thing.”
Laura Lara, a 50-year-old Argentinian native who moved to Rego Park, Queens, in 2022, said that she had struggled to connect to a Jewish community in the city until attending Kehillat Harlem’s Purim party last year.
“Being an emigre from another country and another language, finding the right place was a little bit hard for me at the beginning,” said Lara. “Finally, I found a place, and I went to a celebration of Purim in Harlem, and I found the diversity, everyone has a voice, everyone has a place, and that is what I like.”
After making the “schlep” to services and community events at Kehillat Harlem over the past year, Lara said that she and her husband are considering making the move to Harlem.
“I am also thinking of moving to the area,” said Lara. “I feel like I live in a bubble in my neighborhood, my community and the values and the place is far away from my home.”
In August, Kehillat Harlem marked a milestone — and another journey from Queens to Harlem — by dedicating a Torah that had been rescued during the Holocaust from Germany in 1940 and donated by the former Bayside Jewish Center.
“By bringing this Torah into Kehillat Harlem and returning it to use, we’re literally carrying it into the next generation,” Savitch said at the dedication ceremony. “We’re weaving together its survival through the Holocaust, its history in Queens and its future here in the neighborhood of Harlem, so we’re marking not just the dedication of this Torah, but the renewal of Jewish life in Harlem.”
Savitch said his dream is for Kehillat Harlem to become a one-stop shop for services, classes and communal gatherings and kosher food in Harlem.
Doing so could help hack the high cost of real estate in New York City. In neighborhoods with dense Jewish infrastructure, small synagogues have begun sharing space with Jewish organizations, but that’s not as much of an option in Harlem.
“The dream is really to have a fully multi-purpose space, especially as costs are going up and synagogues are having a hard time paying rent, and restaurants are closing left and right, especially kosher restaurants,” said Savitch.
While other parts of the city boast dozens of Jewish and kosher restaurants, Harlem has fewer options for its Jewish neighbors, including Silvana, a restaurant that serves Israeli cuisine, and Tzion Cafe, a kosher and vegan Ethiopian-Israeli restaurant.
To fill the gap in kosher offerings, Savitch transformed Kehillat Harlem into a makeshift restaurant in 2024 for Passover, and hosted a weekly program called “Shtiebel Sundays” last year where kosher pastries and coffee were for sale.
While Savitch said that Shtiebel Sundays hadn’t garnered revenue for the shul, he said it was “successful as a community-building model.”
“That’s also part of what we’re doing,” he said. “In a community that can’t necessarily yet support a fully functioning kosher cafe, restaurant, whatever it is, we’re providing that as a nonprofit.”
The post At a former driving school, Kehillat Harlem plants roots for Jewish life uptown appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Teens, seniors explore Ashkenazi traditions at Yiddish New York festival
A group of klezmer musicians was jamming in Lower Manhattan, when its fiddler suddenly stopped and encouraged a preteen clarinetist to lead a tune. After a moment, the young musician began playing a traditional Yiddish dance melody known as “der shtiler bulgar,” and the other musicians joined in.
This was one of many scenes at the 11th annual Yiddish New York festival that took place last month at the New York City campus of Hebrew Union College.
The size of the festival was impressive: Over 100 speakers, 700 participants and 200 workshops and sessions on various aspects of Yiddish culture.
Yiddish New York began after KlezKamp, a storied Yiddish cultural festival that had been held in the Catskills for three decades, made its decision to shut down. “It was 2014 and KlezKamp had announced its last festival,” said Pete Rushefsky, executive director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance and one of the lead organizers of Yiddish New York. “A bunch of us got together and said ‘we can’t bear to face the world without our Yiddish festival.’”
Now that the college has announced the sale of its Manhattan campus to nearby New York University, the five-day festival will be searching for a new home for 2026. “We’re going to have to find a new venue,” said Rushefsky. “It will be a challenge we will have to overcome. I’d love to see a residential component moving forward — I think there’s an interest.”
When he wasn’t helping out with administrative tasks, Rushefsky spent much of the day behind a tsimbl (an Eastern European hammered string instrument with a long history in the klezmer tradition), leading informal klezmer jams.
The festival’s offerings were wide-ranging within the scope of Yiddish culture: practical workshops, lectures, concerts, film screenings and informal music jams. And, of course, plenty of schmoozing.
Concerts included an evening of music by the versatile Yiddish playwright and performer Mikhl Yashinsky whose setlist included original Yiddish tradaptations (adapting a text from one language to another to make it culturally relevant for a new audience) of Tom Lehrer’s “Hanukkah in Santa Monica” and Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side.” Yashinsky also performed, together with a group of collaborators, several original songs and scenes from his Yiddish stage works Feast of the Seven Sinners and The Gospel According to Chaim.
Cantor Sarah Myerson and Dr. Avia Moore led a Yiddish Dance Fellows program featuring four fellows from around the country: Hannah Mira Friedland (Chicago), Sarah Horowitz (Albuquerque), Yael Horowitz (NYC), and Rachel Linsky (Boston). All were already leading, teaching and in some cases even choreographing Yiddish dance in their communities.
But the training that Myerson and Moore gave them wasn’t just about learning dance steps. They also role-played typical scenes where dance sessions might not go so smoothly. “Avia and I offered the most common ‘disruptions’ we experience on the dance floor: ignoring the leader, talking loudly, doing the wrong steps, etc. The fellows adjusted with generous grace!” Myerson said.
There were also programs for younger audiences. Teens learned about a 1950s music group, the Jewish Young Folksingers, affiliated with the International Workers Order, a mutual aid organization targeted during the Second Red Scare. Yiddish folk singer Ethel Raim, who was a part of the Jewish Young Folksingers herself, taught songs from the group’s history and shared her experiences in it. On the last day of the festival, the teens presented a skit based on all they had learned.
“It was really exciting to have that many generations in one room; we were spanning almost eight decades,” said Ozzy Gold-Shapiro, one of the teen program’s organizers. The youngest was 10; the oldest — in her eighties. “I was especially moved watching the Teen Program kids express and perform their version of cultural exploration and participation,” said Raim, who is herself in her 80s.
On the last evening of the festival, people gathered for the awarding of the 14th “Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Award” to musician and researcher Michael Alpert, known affectionately by his Yiddish name, Meyshke. Cooper, a singer and Yiddish cultural activist who passed away in 2011, played a leading role in the contemporary revival of Yiddish music.
“I was inspired and touched by Adrienne’s ability to make the Yiddish tradition accessible,” Alpert said. “There was a time when I thought I’d be the last person in the world who knew how to sing old Yiddish ballads and obviously that’s not the case. The younger cohort of this remarkable intergenerational community is one of the great joys of my life.”
The post Teens, seniors explore Ashkenazi traditions at Yiddish New York festival appeared first on The Forward.