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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.”
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Catholic University of America Under Fire for Requiring ‘Opposing Viewpoint’ for Combating Antisemitism Event
A general view of the Catholic University of America (CUA) campus in Washington, DC. Photo: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The Catholic University of America (CUA) is being criticized for denying the Students Supporting Israel campus organization approval to host events on combating antisemitism and defending Israeli security unless it agrees to feature “opposing viewpoints.”
The episode began earlier this month when Students Supporting Israel (SSI), a national organization that has faced opposition from CUA before, publicly complained that the university refused to sanction both an event in which US Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) would discuss “ending campus antisemitism” and another featuring an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier with experience in resisting jihadist terrorism along Israel’s security fence with the West Bank.
According to university policy, civil dialogue on the contemporary issues can’t be held unless it includes “speakers representing both sides.” While the policy purports to promote intellectual exchange, critics say it has the effect of compelling speech or censoring it altogether by imposing conditions on free speech to which no group could agree without undermining its mission.
In SSI’s case, the group has said that CUA’s policy demands the participation of anti-Israel, even antisemitic voices who would leverage a speaking engagement to utter dehumanizing opinions about Jews or propaganda confected by the Hamas terrorist organization and other groups which seek to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
The case has now become the cause of the Foundation for Individual Right and Expression (FIRE), a group which has at times disagreed with the pro-Israel community’s outlook on free speech issues.
“While CUA is a private university and therefore not bound by the First Amendment, it is legally and morally bound to adhere to the institutional commitments it has voluntarily made to protect students’ freedom of speech,” FIRE said on March 18 in a blistering demand letter to the university. “Forcing student organizations ‘to host or accommodate another speaker’s message,’ even in the service of providing a greater range of views, inevitable ‘alters the expressive content’ of the event. Having made these free speech commitments, it is no more appropriate for CUA to require Students Supporting Israel to host speakers who oppose Israel than it would be for the federal or state government to force CUA to couple its institutional pro-Catholic messages with anti-Catholic viewpoints.”
This is not the first time that the Catholic University of America has allegedly trampled on the rights of pro-Israel advocates.
In October, it allegedly used bureaucratic obstruction to suppress Jewish grieving and commemoration of the children, women, and men whom Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists murdered during the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel by canceling a memorial display that was approved in August.
According to the school’s SSI chapter, university officials cited an arcane policy which proscribes flying the flag of any foreign nation, except for that of the Vatican, on campus. However, SSI maintains that it was selectively applied to it with malice, citing that anti-Israel organizations have flown the Palestinian flag on campus numerous times, with and without official permission, as have many other organizations.
At the time, The Algemeiner requested photographic evidence of SSI’s claims of selective enforcement, to which the group responded by sending several pictures showing dozens of foreign flags flying on the campus, including those representing the nations of Brazil, France, and Ukraine. The group added that after canceling SSI’s memorial for the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 atrocities, university staff marched toward the event spaces and dismantled everything SSI had set up and topped off the act by stuffing Israeli flags into a plastic bag, which was left on a random office chair as an afterthought.
On Monday, SSI president Felipe Avila told The Algemeiner that CUA has a pattern of squelching pro-Israel speech.
“These event details are not isolated incidents; they represent a systemic pattern of discrimination we have faced since our founding,” Avila said. “From the dismantling of our Oct. 7 memorial to the unequal enforcement of event guidelines today, administrators consistently place insurmountable hurdles in front of our students. We should not be forced to platform competing viewpoints as a condition of discussing our own community’s safety and security.”
Citing the Second Vatican Council’s rejection of antisemitism in the Catholic Church, he added, “Students Supporting Israel will continue to vigorously defend our right to speak out against antisemitism, in the very spirit of the Church’s own teaching in Nostra Aetate.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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London Jewish Community Feels ‘Anxious’ but ‘Resilient’ as It Prepares for Potential Future Attacks
A person holds a sign near the scene where four ambulances belonging to Hatzola, a Jewish community organization, were set on fire in an incident that the police say is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime, in northwest London, Britain, March 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Isabel Infantes
The Jewish community in London is feeling “very anxious” while trying to stay vigilant and prepared for potential incidents in the future after four Hatzalah emergency vehicles were destroyed in an antisemitic arson attack last week, the president of the UK’s main Jewish umbrella organization said on Sunday.
“We’ve had two-and-a half-years of very high levels of antisemitism, obviously, the deadly attack at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester just in October, and now this incident, an arson attack in the heart of London’s Jewish community in Golders Green,” Phil Rosenberg of the Board of Deputies of British Jews said during an appearance on “BBC London Politics.”
“It is nonetheless a very resilient and proud community, and we are looking at how we push back and build back stronger,” Rosenberg added.
Roughly 150,000 Jewish people live in London.
Rosenberg, a deputy at a north London synagogue and former Labour councillor in Camden, was also asked about the British government’s response to the arson attack. He said that, with help from the government, the Jewish community in London is now equipped with specialist kits designed to help during future attacks, including equipment that could help with chemical exposure. The equipment was provided through a £28.4 million government grant to the Community Security Trust (CST), a Jewish charity that safeguards the safety and security of Jews across the UK.
“On the way here, I was looking at my WhatsApps. I saw one come in from my synagogue, and it was talking not about the great services we put on, the outreach to local communities, the wonderful art and charity that we do, but about a series of kits we’ve just received that will help the community if there’s an attack to stem the flow of blood, or if there’s a chemical attack. That is the situation we’re facing,” Rosenberg explained.
“It’s sad that it’s needed, though,” he added. “Because what we need to do is prevent this and create a situation where those things are not the things we’re talking about, and those are not the things we need. We want to be celebrating the Jewish community, and all communities in this city, and not [be] in fear of those sorts of attacks happening.”
Last year, there were over 1,800 antisemitic incidents in London, according to data compiled by CST. When asked if the Jewish community believes the government is doing enough to tackle the issue of antisemitism, Rosenberg said the response is “mixed.” He noted the speed at which the British government provided replacements vehicles for the Hatzalah ambulances destroyed last week and other moves by the government, like proscribing the pro-Hamas group Palestine Action.
“The government still needs to go further,” Rosenberg added, before calling for British leaders to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and to take more action to combat hatred flourishing on social media, among other issues.
“We’ve seen in our society a growth of extremism … and we are very concerned that we are seeing society being pulled apart,” he said. “We need to come together, among all communities, to push back against hatred in all its forms, including antisemitism, and marginalize those extremists.”
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Antisemitic Acts in Australia Persist With Car Attack, Statue Vandalism
A suspect commits vandalism outside the Victorian Trades Hall on March 6. Photo: Facebook screenshot.
Law enforcement in Australia has launched investigations into multiple recent antisemitic incidents, including a car attack on Hasidic men on Saturday and the vandalism earlier this month of a statue honoring an Australian Jewish feminist.
The Victoria branch of the Community Security Group (CSG), an organization focused on protecting local Jews, released a statement on Saturday alerting the community of an incident in Melbourne “on Glen Eira Road, Ripponlea, where a vehicle swerved towards community members while occupants shouted antisemitic remarks.”
The CSG reported that “Victoria Police patrols were active in the area and responded to the scene rapidly. There are no reports of physical injuries. CSG is liaising closely with police and continuing to monitor the situation.”
Ripponlea has a significant Haredi population with members of the Adass Israel community comprising 15.2 percent of the population. The neighborhood has seen other recent antisemitic incidents, including the bombing of the group’s synagogue in December 2024.
The suspects — four women — allegedly drove a black Hyundai stolen on Wednesday from a home in the Caulfield suburb. Victoria police confirmed they had opened an investigation and received reports of other incidents involving the antisemitic occupants driving erratically and throwing eggs at people while yelling abuse.
“Those responsible are brazen, bold, and appear to act with impunity,” Naomi Levin, the CEO of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV), told The Australian.
On Friday, Victoria Police announced the arrests of seven women alleged to have vandalized the statue of Zelda D’Aprano — a Jewish Australian feminist — outside the Victorian Trades Hall on March 6 at approximately 11:00 am.
In a statement, law enforcement described the women as part of an activist group and listed their ages as ranging between 34 and 71. The police stated that security footage showed that the vandals pulled out umbrellas to conceal their identities as they sprayed black and red paint on the statue. They also hung a “difficult woman” apron.
D’Aprano worked as an advocate for women’s rights from the 1950s through the 1980s and co-founded the Women’s Action Committee in 1970. She was known to have chained herself to a government building in 1969 to advocate equal pay for women. Her statue was unveiled in 2023.
The activists face charges of “criminal damage, behaving in a riotous manner in a public place, marking graffiti on a residence without consent, recklessly damaging part of a registered place without a permit, and refusing to leave scheduled public place after a warning.” An eighth suspect remains at large.
So far, the only named suspect is Jemima Demanuele, 34, who appeared in a Melbourne court on Friday and was reportedly on bail for another protesting offense.
Victoria Police officer Tiffany Lamesta pushed back on releasing Demanuele, saying that “the accused has been given bail for the last incident but is showing no respect for court orders” and warning that “police believe the accused will continue to offend if she’s granted bail.”
Demanuele is currently on paid leave from her position at St Vincent’s Hospital as staff conduct a Fair Work investigation.
Magistrate Michelle Hodgson granted Demanuele bail and instructed her that “there is no issue with protest, but it must be lawful, it must not endanger the safety and welfare of other persons and it must not cause property damage.”
Police have not yet stated a motive for the vandalism. Photographs from the scene show multiple members of the group wearing black and white keffiyehs, the symbol of anti-Israel militancy popularized by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Antisemitism surged in Australia following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks across southern Israel. On Feb. 24, Australia announced the creation of a Royal Commission led by retired judge Virginia Bell to investigate antisemitism in the country following the murder of 15 Jews at Bondi Beach in December.
Bell said that the commission needs to “investigate the security arrangements for that event, and to report on whether our intelligence and law enforcement agencies performed to maximum effectiveness.”
Australia’s intelligence authorities revealed last year that the Islamic regime in Iran had directed antisemitic acts in the country using cryptocurrency to compensate criminals, prompting the expulsion of Iran’s Ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi and three other officials.
On Friday, the CSG and JCCV released an annual report on antisemitism in Australia’s Victoria state, documenting 564 incidents, the highest number ever recorded.
“Behind each of these reports is a Jewish person,” Levin said. “A child in school uniform abused on a school excursion, a man in a kippah verbally abused on public transport, a worshipper arriving at synagogue to find hateful words painted on its walls, a business owner wiping racist symbols off their window before opening for the day.”