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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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They want Jewish life without Zionism. Now they’re building the institutions to match.
(JTA) — One year after Jewish Currents editor-at-large Arielle Angel called for “new Jewish institutions” that have no attachment to Israel or Zionism, more than 100 Jews crammed into a Victorian house-turned-event space in central Brooklyn in hopes of creating them.
The event was billed as a bootcamp for people hoping to get fledgling Jewish groups off the ground. Sessions focused on topics like staffing and funding, as well as discussions about who, exactly, is welcome in a space that is “anti-Zionist,” “non-Zionist,” “diasporist” and the like.
Many of the groups represented on Monday were minyans, which host prayer services in locations like people’s apartments or community spaces. They sought practical guidance for building their institutions, but also for defining who to welcome as their ranks expand.
“If we’re doing things right,” Angel said, “many of these small minyans will be synagogues in a few years.”
Esti, 27, who declined to share her last name to maintain privacy, is involved in leading an anti-Zionist minyan in Brooklyn. She said she has heard from “so many” attendees that they were relieved to attend services in a space without an Israeli flag.
“People are like, ‘I never thought I could be in a Jewish space like this, I never thought I’d see queer people leading, I never thought I could be in a Jewish space where they’re saying Free Palestine,’” she said. The minyan averages about 50 attendees at Shabbat services, she said.
Some of the speakers at the workshop detailed how they have refused to compromise their organizations’ politics. One panel led by Rabbi Brant Rosen, who helped found the anti-Zionist synagogue Tzedek Chicago, and Rebecca Vilkomerson, the former director of the anti-Zionist group, Jewish Voice for Peace, focused on the process of setting an organization’s “political boundaries.”
Rosen spoke from his own experience, saying that Tzedek Chicago was presented as “consciously not an inclusive community.”
“In other words, this is what we stand for, it might not be for you, it might not be for everyone, and that’s OK. There are many places out there that you can choose,” he said. Rosen added that potential members were not forced to agree in order to join, but rather that they were faced with the question: “Given that these are our values, is this a community you want to belong to?”
Esti spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the sideline of the Urbane Arts Club event, which JTA attended on the condition that attendees’ in-session remarks throughout the day were kept off the record, though panelists’ remarks were all on the record.
Americans’ support for Israel has dropped writ large amid its military campaign in Gaza and the war with Iran. A survey by the Jewish Federations of North America found that 37% of Jewish respondents said they identified as Zionist, while 7% labeled themselves anti-Zionist and another 8% said they were non-Zionist. Another 18% said they weren’t sure, while 30% said none of the labels described them.
According to an AP-NORC poll from earlier this year, support for Israel is a less significant component of younger Jews’ religious identity versus Jews older than 45.
“These groups are starting up because of demand,” Rabbi Alissa Wise told JTA.
Wise is a co-founder of the Jewish Diaspora Movement, the group behind Monday’s bootcamp, which is itself in its beginning stages. She has previously worked for JVPe and in October 2023 founded Rabbis for Ceasefire, which has protested for a Gaza ceasefire and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.
While JVP “played a pivotal role in building Jewish life outside of Zionism,” Wise said there was still a major gap in religious and cultural Jewish institutions that reject Zionism.
In addition to the represented minyans, which facilitate prayer services, and the havurahs, which offer events such as Shabbat dinners and other holiday celebrations, Angel said some attendees were looking to start projects including summer camps, educational offerings and cultural projects such as theater collectives.
Jen Kaminsky, an attendee who is part of the Buffalo Jewish Collective’s leadership team, told JTA that her organization welcomes “a range of Jews, many of whom have not felt comfortable in legacy Jewish institutions.”
“We say that we welcome anti-Zionists and non-Zionists, and people who are questioning Zionism and people who have a range of relationships to Zionism,” Kaminsky said. “If you are comfortable with the values that we put out, or you’re comfortable being in a room where those values are the dominant values, we welcome you.”
Vilkomerson told the group that there should be an attempt to grow membership by engaging people closer to the center in “left-liberal coalitions,” but without making concessions on left-wing values. She put the concept into New York City political terms, pointing to the political alliance between the anti-Zionist Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the liberal Zionist Brad Lander.
“Brad, as a liberal Zionist, was able to partner with Zohran Mamdani — but Zohran set the terms of the campaign, not Brad,” she said.
Also on Monday, Lissy Romanow — a co-founder of the group IfNotNow, which describes itself as “anti-occupation” — gave a nuts-and-bolts session on the first steps of creating an organization, including how to concisely conceive of a group’s DNA and how to avoid burnout among volunteers.
As groups look to grow and achieve loftier goals like setting up permanent locations and hiring paid staff, one clear obstacle stands in the way: funding.
“There’s only so much money on the Jewish left,” Angel told JTA.
Any anti-Zionist group is highly unlikely to receive funds from one of the country’s many Jewish federations, which often maintain deep ties to Israel.
Three left-wing Jewish donors — Liana Krupp, Deborah Sagner and Kathleen Peratis — spoke on Monday about the limited landscape of funding for Jewish anti-Zionist organizations.
“If we don’t flip liberal Zionists we’re not going to grow, because that’s where the money is,” Peratis said.
Participants on Monday, whose groups are mostly volunteer-run, did not have any illusions about that landscape.
“For now, the goal is to keep doing Shabbat in a sustainable way on a regular basis,” Esti said. But she also shared her long-term vision.
“I think it would be amazing to have a brick-and-mortar shul, a place we could call our definitive home,” she said. “But that’s way, way far down the line.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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After bronze win, judo athlete Raz Hershko tells JTA, ‘I stand for something far bigger than myself.’
(JTA) — Israeli judoka Raz Hershko, one of the country’s top athletes, missed a major opportunity in 2025 when the 12-day war between Israel and Iran closed Israeli airspace, preventing her from traveling to Budapest. Earlier this year, she withdrew from the Tashkent Grand Slam after the Shin Bet ordered the Israeli team to leave Uzbekistan.
But nothing could keep Hershko off the podium this weekend, when she won a bronze medal at the World Judo Championships in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Hershko, 28, burst into tears after winning the bout that secured her medal.
“Representing Israel has always been something that moves me, but at this moment, it carries so much more meaning,” Hershko told JTA. “At the end of the day, I step onto the mat alone, but I feel like I have an entire country behind me.”
Hershko dedicated her victory to the memory of Yonatan Gutin, an Israeli soldier killed on Oct. 7, 2023, as well as his family and the people of Israel.
According to his official memorial page, Gutin, a 20-year-old Israel Defense Forces officer, was killed fighting to rescue civilians during the battle for Kibbutz Be’eri. Judo was a central part of his life. He had trained in the sport for about 14 years and was a member of Israel’s cadet national team. Even during his military service, he occasionally returned to his judo club to coach.
Despite the achievement, Hershko made clear that bronze was not the result she had hoped for.
“I’m pretty disappointed that the day ended with a bronze medal, because I was aiming for gold,” she said. “But now it’s time to look ahead to the next goals.”
Hershko has established herself in recent years as one of the world’s leading judokas and one of Israel’s most prominent athletes. She won an individual silver medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics and a gold medal at the 2024 European Championships. She competes in the women’s heavyweight division.
Her latest achievement came just days after Israel marked the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks, a date that has continued to shape the country’s public life and weigh heavily on its athletes competing abroad.
“Knowing that I was able to give people back home even a few moments of happiness, a smile, a sense of pride — that means so much to me. Especially during the times we’re going through, these are the moments that remind me why I do what I do,” she added.
The judoka said that “everything has felt different since Oct. 7” and that she can’t “disconnect” herself from the Israeli reality.
“Before that, I would go into competitions feeling immense pride in representing my country,” she said. “Today, that pride is even stronger. I’m much more aware of what the flag I wear represents, and of the fact that I stand for something far bigger than myself.”
Hershko, however, has little time to dwell on the medal. She told Channel 13 that she would take two days off before returning to training ahead of another competition next week. Asked by JTA how she has managed to stay hungry and focused after achieving so much, the Israeli athlete said she simply enjoys the journey.
“I really love what I do. I love judo, I love competing, I love the challenges, and I think that’s what keeps me hungry,” she said. “Of course, I’m proud of everything I’ve achieved, but I never feel like I’m done or that there’s nothing left to strive for. At the end of the day, the medals are incredible moments, but the journey is what builds me as an athlete, and I’m still enjoying that journey.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Jewish school educators cancel trip to Italy after Italian education program required participants to denounce ‘genocide’ in Gaza
(JTA) — Educators from Jewish schools across the U.S. canceled a study trip to Reggio Emilia, Italy, over whether the hosts would require participants to formally distance themselves from Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
The controversy has drawn accusations of antisemitism from Jewish educators and from Italian Jewish community leaders. It has also sparked a political dispute in Italy.
In an email sent to participants on Oct. 9, the American organizers, the Paradigm Project, said they canceled the trip because of “antisemitic pressure being placed on the group.” In a Zoom call with the participants, the organizers also cited safety concerns amid the scrutiny of the Jewish school educators’ personal profiles by pro-Palestinian activists who were agitating for the declaration, a participant said.
In a leaked audio recording broadcast Monday evening by Italy’s Tg3 TV news program, the president of the host organization Reggio Children, Maddalena Tedeschi, discussed asking participants to sign declarations distancing themselves from the “occupation of territories and genocide.” The recording is of an Oct. 6 meeting of the city’s early childhood education council.
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Reggio Children spokesperson Francesca Severini said the request — intended to appease local pro-Palestinian activists — had never become an official participation requirement, but acknowledged that the additional wording had been discussed.
The Paradigm Project, a professional development network for Jewish early childhood educators, organized the trip for 68 Jewish educators. A separate delegation of 22 educators from Israel arrived in Reggio and was participating in the program this week.
“Now, more than ever, we must bring back the light and keep the bridge between us strong,” the Israeli educators said in opening remarks Monday.
Reggio Children, an educational organization partly owned by the municipality, promotes the city’s internationally influential approach to early childhood education and provides training for educators. Reggio Emilia Mayor Marco Massari and the city’s education official Marwa Mahmoud did not respond to requests for comment.
The cancellation, which came in a phone call from Paradigm to Reggio Children on Oct. 7, follows months of tensions in the city, where pro-Palestinian activists had protested the participating schools’ ties to Israel. During the weeks preceding the trip, activist Cosimo Pederzoli had publicly accused some of the schools of supporting the Israeli military.
At the Oct. 6 meeting, Reggio Children presented a charter, titled “For a Democratic and Participatory Education,” asking visiting groups and partners to uphold human rights, oppose discrimination, reject war, and condemn genocide. The charter, which was approved and is now on the organization’s website, also opposes violations of human rights in occupied territories worldwide, without naming Israel or Gaza.
Severini, the spokesperson, said that activists, teachers and parents had pressured Reggio Children and the municipality to take the charter one step further and requiring participants to agree to the statement: “I … hereby declare that I distance myself from the occupation of Gaza and the violation of children’s and human beings’ rights in occupied territories as well as every place in the world.”
Severini said that the wording was included as “material for discussion” in a private WhatsApp group. The American organizers were not in the chat, she said, and subsequently received the wording without the context that it would not, in the end, be official language.
Her account contradicts Reggio Children’s earlier public statements. On Oct. 7, the organization acknowledged that the educators had been asked to explicitly distance themselves from the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in response to concerns raised in the city. Mayor Marco Massari also acknowledged the additional commitment in a public statement, which says, “This Charter will be signed by all delegations visiting Reggio Emilia in the coming months and years.”
In an email to parents, leaders of Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s early childhood centers in Los Angeles said seven of their educators had been scheduled to join the trip and expressed support for Paradigm’s decision to cancel.
“Paradigm, on behalf of our educators and dozens of others, rightfully refused and canceled participation in the study tour and conference, due to the refusal to sign and other security considerations,” read the email. “All participants were notified on October 7, 2026.”
Pesha Kletenik, head of Manhattan Day School, had planned to join the trip. “This was one of the most painful experiences I’ve had,” Kletenik told JTA. “I never felt so targeted as a Jew before in my life. I’m an American citizen. I have one passport. I’ve lived here my entire life.”
Kletenik said she had hoped to adapt the Reggio approach to Jewish teaching and practice, including their model Passover seder, because “it aligns so beautifully with Jewish values.”
Steve Freedman, head of Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County, New Jersey, said his school withdrew an educator from a separate trip planned for November. In a letter to families, he criticized the demand for a political declaration while affirming the school’s commitment to the Reggio approach.
The council of the Jewish Community of Modena and Reggio Emilia, a single institution based in nearby Modena that serves both cities, condemned efforts to boycott educational and cultural initiatives involving Jews. It described the conflation of diaspora Jews with Israel’s government as antisemitic.
The Reggio Emilia approach, developed after World War II by educator Loris Malaguzzi and local families, places children’s exploration, expression, and participation at the center of early childhood learning. It gained wider international recognition after Newsweek named one of the city’s preschools among the world’s 10 best schools in 1991.
Severini said Reggio Children’s relationships with American Jewish and Israeli educators stretch back roughly three decades. The Israeli liaison first visited in 1996, she said, and educators from Reggio have also traveled to the United States and Israel.
The organization has hosted educators from all over the world, Severini said, including China, Russia, and Iran. She said she knew of no comparable controversy involving other visiting groups, including previous delegations from Jewish schools.
Reggio Children, she said, hoped to continue its dialogue with the American educators. For Manhattan Day School’s Kletenik, the cancellation stood in stark contrast with the educational values that had drawn her to the approach.
“How are we to navigate rejection by the very experts we collectively idealized—the gatekeepers of the sensitive worldviews and teachings we trusted to nurture our most tender children?” she wrote in a message to her school’s board.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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