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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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We’re losing the fight against antisemitism. Here’s how to turn the tide
Why are we failing to effectively fight antisemitism?
When New York Times columnist Bret Stephens sparked a furor by making the case, earlier this month, that it’s time for the Jewish community to stop prioritizing that fight — because we’ve invested so much in trying to educate people about antisemitism, yet there is still antisemitism — he got the fundamental issue wrong.
The question is not whether we should try to fight antisemitism. It’s how. What if we took Stephens’s premise — that these efforts aren’t working — and imagined what could?
Since Stephens’ speech, our communal reaction has been too focused on the smaller-scale issues he raised. Was his critique of the ADL reasonable? Was he right that Jews are hated because of our “virtues and successes,” and that antisemitism is too powerful for appeals to tolerance and education to work? By focusing on such questions, we risk missing the bigger picture. Antisemitism will never be fully eradicated. Still, if, as one study suggests, some 45% of Republicans under the age of 44 feel that Jews are a threat to the American way of life, the answer can’t be to shrug.
But the fact that we have yet to make meaningful 21st-century strides in reducing antisemitism — and that, per most polls and studies, we’re going in the opposite direction — means that we need to rethink how to combat it in 21st-century terms. Here are three ideas for how to begin.
Invest in media literacy
Given that we know that antisemitism and conspiracy theories work together to sow distrust and paranoia and induce nihilism, perhaps Jewish leaders should spend more time pushing for greater investment in media literacy — not only about antisemitism, but in general.
A 2022 Stanford study found that “high school students who received only six 50-minute lessons in digital literacy were twice as likely to spot questionable websites as they were before the instruction took place.” At first glance, media literacy isn’t “about” or “for” Jews. But a 2025 study from Chapman University found that young people, like the rest of us, are being pushed by social media into echo chambers. Increasingly, and relatedly, they believe all information is suspect, or at least equally agenda-driven — a reality that makes pushing back on conspiracy theories more difficult, particularly when research has also found that teenagers are likely to believe content if they see it over and over again.
A country in which more people are taught how to be on guard against conspiracy and untruths is one in which people are more prepared to identify and critically react to the antisemitism being sprinkled into their media diet.
Rethink how we teach about the Holocaust
In his address, Stephens also essentially said that Holocaust education hasn’t worked. After all, we tried it, and yet, per the Claims Conference, “nearly 20% of Millennials and Gen Z in New York feel the Jews caused the Holocaust.”
But is it that teaching about the Holocaust doesn’t work — or that we need to teach it differently?
Some studies suggest that learning about the Holocaust increases tolerance toward minorities and people with different viewpoints. They also suggest, however, that mandating Holocaust education as an isolated item — rather than as part of a broader education in history and bigotry — doesn’t do much to help improve students’ knowledge.
The lesson here is that how we are teaching and learning about the Holocaust matters. Some, like scholars Jennifer Rich and William L. Smith, have suggested moving from a “learn from” approach to a “learn about” approach. Rather than use the Holocaust to teach students why they shouldn’t be antisemitic, the thinking goes, we should use it to teach them about the societal conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen, and what actually transpired during it.
In other words, if we are too focused on Holocaust as an overarching moral lesson, we may fail to teach its concrete takeaways — about how hatred builds in a society, and the devastation that can follow — effectively.
Map the full network of hate
Finally, maybe we can’t fight antisemitism if we think about it in isolation. Our identity — and the suffering that can accompany it — does not exist in a silo.
There are good reasons to think that it’s more effective to fight antisemitism in tandem with other hatreds. In a 2016 study, researchers Maureen A. Craig and Jennifer A. Richeson looked at what they called “stigma-based solidarity.” What they found is that certain social conditions can push stigmatized group members to turn against other stigmatized groups, while other conditions can encourage them to turn toward one another. Consider how some Jewish and Muslim students became suspicious of one another during the Gaza war — and also how, as the Forward recently reported, some have found deeper connections since.
“One way to bridge the category divide,” Craig and Richeson wrote, “is by making an explicit connection between the in-group and another stigmatized group.…Common experiences or challenges are also associated with more coalitional attitudes among stigmatized groups.”
That means that pointing out the ways in which, say antisemitism and racism can play off each other can build solidarity between the targets of those hatreds. It is true that antisemitism is in some ways exceptional: it often functions in ways that look different from other forms of bigotry. But stressing its exceptionality may be working directly against the solidarity other minority groups feel for us.
In addition to hopefully building solidarity, explicitly drawing the link between antisemitism and other hatreds — and between Jews and other members of society — would be more honest and accurate. Antisemitism doesn’t only have negative consequences for Jews. We are seeing across the country, for instance, how the great replacement theory villainizes Jews and immigrants alike. When we embolden those who push conspiracy theories and nihilism, they hurt Jews, but they do not hurt Jews alone.
The pain of many persecuted groups in this country are bound up together. Maybe our way forward is, too.
The post We’re losing the fight against antisemitism. Here’s how to turn the tide appeared first on The Forward.
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‘No Way’ to Disarm Hamas Without Israel Taking All of Gaza, Former General Says
Israeli military personnel operate on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border, on the day the Israeli military said it had resumed enforcing the Gaza ceasefire agreement after a series of strikes across the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Israel will need to take over all of Gaza to meet its war objectives, a senior reserve Israeli general said, as the United States moves ahead with plans to assemble a multinational stabilization force that is not expected to deploy in Hamas-controlled areas.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi, a former deputy commander of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)’s Gaza Division, said the military aims of the war — including the disarmament of Hamas — cannot be achieved without moving into the remaining parts of the enclave still held by the Palestinian terrorist group.
“There is no way to reach the goals of war without conquering Gaza,” Avivi told The Algemeiner.
“Ninety-nine point nine percent, the IDF is going to be the [party] that will dismantle Hamas,” Avivi said, noting that the Trump administration’s International Stabilization Force is expected to deploy only in Israeli-held areas and avoid confronting Hamas directly.
A decisive campaign could be completed in a month or two, Avivi said, because the constraints that slowed earlier phases of the war — most notably the presence of Israeli hostages in Hamas-held areas — no longer apply. The IDF could expand from its current 53 percent control of Gaza to 75 percent in “as little as a week,” he said.
With the Israeli security cabinet focused on Iran, no final decision has been taken yet on the next phase in Gaza, Avivi said. The government is likely to give Hamas “a month or two” to see if a confrontation with Iran materializes before moving to conclude the campaign in Gaza.
Avivi is the founder and chairman of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, known in Hebrew as Habitchonistim, a hawkish group of former senior officers and security officials that has consistently pushed for maximal military objectives in Gaza and opposed negotiated compromises with Hamas.
According to US and Israeli officials, the stabilization force is expected to begin deploying in southern Gaza, starting in Rafah, and expand gradually as conditions allow. The force is intended to help establish governance and security conditions in cleared areas, rather than conduct combat operations or forcibly disarm armed groups. Its commander, US Army Major General Jasper Jeffers, has said five countries — Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Albania — have committed personnel so far, with longer-term planning envisioning a significantly larger deployment of up to 20,000 troops and police focused on policing, security coordination and aid facilitation.
The Guardian reported last week that US contracting documents describe plans for a 350-acre military base in Gaza designed to support 5,000 people that will include watchtowers, bunkers, and training facilities. A US official declined to discuss the contract and reiterated that Washington does not plan to deploy US combat troops to the enclave.
The stabilization effort was formally launched in Washington on Thursday, when US President Donald Trump convened the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace. Trump said participating countries had pledged roughly $7 billion as an initial down payment for Gaza reconstruction, while making clear that broader rebuilding would be conditioned on Hamas’s disarmament.
US officials and regional partners acknowledge that demilitarization would likely be a long-term process and that reconstruction carries political risk. Some donor states have privately raised concerns about funding rebuilding efforts only for Israel to return to large-scale military operations.
Avivi said Israel’s takeover of the enclave would be followed by a technically complex cleanup phase focused on dismantling tunnels and weapons stockpiles. “The whole area is full of tunnels and munitions,” he said. “Finding and destroying them is complicated. That part takes time.”
A strategy gaining traction in the US framework would see Gaza divided into two zones, a Hamas-free “green zone,” where reconstruction and alternative civilian governance could begin, and a “red zone” comprising areas still held by Hamas.
Former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror said that while he understands the logic behind the approach, it carries risks. Rebuilding Gaza first in IDF-controlled areas, he said, could allow Hamas to survive politically and militarily elsewhere in the enclave.
“If you build only where the IDF controls, you are effectively telling Hamas: you can stay in Gaza,” Amidror told The Algemeiner.
Avivi agreed that reconstruction would not begin “until they lay down their weapons,” warning that doing otherwise would amount to tolerating Hamas’s continued presence.
The Israeli general pointed to the period leading up to the October ceasefire, when Israeli forces advanced deep into Gaza City and took control of roughly half the city, as an example of how Hamas responds when the IDF enters its core terrain. He said Israel’s subsequent pullback to about 53 percent control of the Gaza Strip was driven by hostage negotiations rather than operational limits.
“It’s going to happen the nice way or the hard way,” Avivi said. “The hard way is the IDF. So, they either lay down the weapons and get out of Gaza or the IDF will go in and impose demilitarization.”
Amidror rejected arguments that Hamas is emerging from the war in a stronger position because of potential involvement by countries such as Qatar or Turkey, calling the claim disconnected from current military realities.
“It’s a stupid argument because Hamas is surrounded on all sides by the IDF — 300 degrees by land and 60 degrees by sea, which the IDF also controls,” Amidror told The Algemeiner. The terrorist group, he explained, cannot receive weapons because it has no land border with Egypt, cannot manufacture arms because Israel has destroyed its production infrastructure, and is surrounded on all sides by Israeli forces.
“The most it can do is fire a missile, probably once every six months,” Amidror said.
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Paris Kosher Restaurant Doused With Acid Amid Surge in Antisemitism Across France
Procession arrives at Place des Terreaux with a banner reading, “Against Antisemitism, for the Republic,” during the march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
A kosher restaurant in Paris has been vandalized with acid, damaging the facility and leading the prosecutor’s office to open an investigation into what authorities suspect was an antisemitism attack.
Employees at Kokoriko, an eatery located in the French capital’s 17th arrondissement, discovered on Friday morning that the acid had been sprayed overnight on the tables, walls, and floor, according to French media.
The crockery, cutlery, and glasses were rendered unusable. White dust was found on the tables from where the acid corroded the surfaces.
The Paris public prosecutor’s office immediately opened an investigation for “damage to the property of others by a means dangerous … committed because of race, ethnicity, nation, or religion.” The crime is punishable by a sentence of 15 years in prison and a fine of 150,000 euros.
Last week was not the first time that Kokoriko was targeted, according to French media. In October, the Kosher restaurant’s façade was sprayed with sulfuric acid. However, the investigation was closed, as authorities were unable to identify the perpetrators.
The most recent attack came one week after the French Interior Ministry released its annual report on anti-religious acts, revealing a troubling rise in antisemitic incidents documented in a joint dataset compiled with the Jewish Community Protection Service.
Antisemitism in France remained at alarmingly high levels last year, with 1,320 incidents recorded nationwide, as Jews and Israelis faced several targeted attacks amid a relentlessly hostile climate despite heightened security measures, according to the newly published data.
Although the total number of antisemitic outrages in 2025 fell by 16 percent compared to 2024’s second highest ever total of 1,570 cases, the newly released report warned that antisemitism remained “historically high,” with more than 3.5 attacks occurring every day.
Over the past 25 years, antisemitic acts “have never been as numerous as in the past three years,” the report said, noting a dramatic spike following the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Even though Jews make up less than 1 percent of France’s population, they accounted for 53 percent of all religiously motivated crimes last year.
Between 2022 and 2025, antisemitic attacks across France quadrupled, leaving the Jewish community more exposed than ever.
The most recent figure of total antisemitic incidents represents a 21 percent decline from 2023’s record high of 1,676 incidents, but a 203 percent increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022, before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
According to French officials, this latest report, which was based on documented cases and official complaints, still underestimated the true scope of the problem, largely due to widespread underreporting.
The rise in antisemitism appears to have carried into this year. Earlier this month, for example, a 13-year-old boy on his way to synagogue in Paris was brutally beaten by a knife-wielding assailant.
Days earlier, three Jewish men wearing kippahs were physically threatened with a knife and forced to flee after leaving their Shabbat services.
That incident came shortly after a Jewish primary school was vandalized, with windows smashed and security equipment damaged.
All three incidents took place in Paris.