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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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Mamdani touts ‘Babies not Bombs’ messaging after flexing political muscle in the New York primaries
(New York Jewish Week) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated the victories of the progressive candidates he endorsed in New York’s Democratic primaries describing their success as a “shift in the balance of power.”
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, the morning after the primaries, Mamdani touted the triumphs as a shift in the balance of power between “working people” and “special interests.”
Mamdani-endorsed candidates Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez won Democratic nominations for Congress. During the press conference, the mayor repeatedly highlighted their calls to restrict U.S. military aid to Israel and redirect federal funding to domestic priorities.
Following Mamdani’s election night sweep in New York, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!”
The victories offered an early demonstration of Mamdani’s political influence beyond City Hall, as several Democratic Socialist candidates he backed, including Chevalier, defeated established Democratic incumbents in their districts.
“The working person is struggling in our city to afford basic needs,” Mamdani said, adding that Avila Chevalier’s oft-repeated slogan of investing in “Babies not Bombs,” is “the kind of conscience, the kind of clarity, the kind of conviction that has been missing in our politics for far too long.”
Mamdani responded to the president’s post on Wednesday, telling a reporter who asked whether his goal is to make America a “socialist” country that his “goal is to make America a place that every American can afford.”
When asked about federal policies that could be affected by Mamdani’s endorsed candidates, the mayor cited Valdez’s support for “foreign policy that understands human rights for all” and Lander’s commitment to co-sponsoring the Block the Bombs Act, which prohibits the sale of certain U.S.-made offensive weapons to Israel.
Mamdani also dismissed a question about whether he was concerned about how the victories would play out in November as Democrats try to win back the House.
“Every time the fight for working people takes a step forward, you will hear Republicans say that this is actually going to jeopardize the existence of that very fight,” he said.
When asked whether the election of Chevalier, who has faced scrutiny for past social media posts attacking Democrats and her appearance at an Oct. 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square, could “complicate campaigns for Democrats as a whole,” Mamdani replied “No.”
“[Chevalier] often speaks about a politics of life. She speaks about ‘Babies not bombs,’” Mamdani continued. “What could be a better example of what the people of the district want to see versus what the people of the district have been forced to experience, which is tens of billions of dollars being spent at a national level to bomb children overseas, while children in our own districts are struggling.”
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Jewish anti-Zionist David Orkin defeats incumbent in NY Assembly primary
(New York Jewish Week) — David Orkin, a Jewish anti-Zionist attorney and democratic socialist, defeated incumbent New York State Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Orkin won State Assembly District 38, which includes parts of Queens.
Orkin, an immigrant workers’ rights attorney and union organizer, received 58.8% of the vote, while Rajkumar, who has represented the district since 2021 and is the first South Asian woman ever elected to office in the state, received 40.9%. The district covers a swath of Queens, including parts of Ridgewood, Glendale, Ozone Park, Woodhaven and Richmond Hill.
“Pro-Palestine candidates are sweeping in NYC tonight,” Jewish Voice for Peace Action wrote in a post on Instagram celebrating Orkin’s win Tuesday. “Palestine was on the ballot — and won. David will be a champion for Palestinian freedom in Albany.”
The post from JVP Action echoed a message Orkin had highlighted throughout his campaign.
“It’s so incredibly meaningful to me to be running this race as an anti-Zionist Jew, to be one of the few anti-Zionist Jewish voices that is in an elected seat in the state government,” Orkin said in an Instagram reel posted by Jewish Voice for Peace Action earlier this month.
He added that, if elected, he would be able to go in front of the state legislature and assert that “criticizing Israel for genocide, demanding an end to the occupation, demanding an end to funding war abroad is not antisemitic.”
Orkin’s victory came amid a strong night for democratic socialist candidates across New York City, including left-wing congressional candidates Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, who also defeated establishment-backed opponents in their primaries.
While Orkin was not endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose winning endorsements of Lander, Chevalier and Valdez signaled a pro-Palestinian lurch for the party in the city with the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel. Nonetheless, his victory elevated a self-described anti-Zionist to the ranks of New York’s elected officials at a time when debates over Israel have become increasingly prominent within Democratic politics.
While Israel-related issues were not listed on Orkin’s platform, which centered on affordability and immigration, he repeatedly expressed his support for a “free Palestine” and attacked Rajkumar’s record of support for the Jewish state during his campaign.
“In the past several years my opponent AM Rajkumar has walked in the Israel day parade but has said NOTHING against the war in Gaza, occupation of Palestine, or Islamophobic attacks faced by the people of New York,” Orkin wrote in a May post on X.
Rajkumar, who was a close political ally of former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, in her campaign platform vowed to combat antisemitism.
After establishing a Jewish Voice for Peace chapter in Tucson, Arizona, in 2014, Orkin remained involved in pro-Palestinian activism as a member of the anti-Zionist activist group.
“I’ve been involved in the Jewish Palestine Solidarity Movement for 12, 13 years,” Orkin told Democratic Left last month. “I’ve dedicated part [of my] life to making sure that Jewish people are creating religious spaces outside of Zionism, and to making more space for Palestinian organizing to have an impact.”
On the campaign trail, Orkin received a host of endorsements from prominent progressive groups and lawmakers, including Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, JVP Action and NYC Democratic Socialists for America.
Rajkumar was endorsed by ActJew, the new nonprofit focused on combatting antisemitism, as well as the Queens Jewish Alliance and Assemblymembers Sam Berger, Kalman Yeger and Chuck Lavine.
Orkin received over $290,000 in campaign contributions for the election cycle, including over $156,000 from the office of the state comptroller, while Rajkumar received over $270,000, including $9,000 from health care executive Daniel Lowy.
“I have dedicated my life fighting for immigrants and workers, I am proud to have earned their support in this election, and I look forward to spending the rest of my life winning the beautiful and joyous lives we deserve,” Orkin said in a statement, according to QNS.
The post Jewish anti-Zionist David Orkin defeats incumbent in NY Assembly primary appeared first on The Forward.
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Half of Americans think the U.S. is ‘too supportive’ of Israel
(JTA) — A new survey found that 48% of American voters think the United States is “too supportive” of Israel, the highest since the pollster started asking the question in 2017.
The survey published Wednesday by Quinnipiac University also found that 60% of respondents reported that military intervention in Iran was “not worth it” as opposed to 34% of voters who said it was “worth it.”
The number of respondents who think the U.S. support of Israel is about right is 38%, while just 7% think the U.S. is not supportive enough of Israel, the poll found.
Broken down by party, 66% of Democrats think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, while 9% think it is not supportive enough and 18% think U.S. support for Israel is about right.
Among Republicans, 20% think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, 69% think American support for Israel is “about right,” and 6% think the U.S. is not supportive enough.
Among independent voters, 55% think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, 34% think U.S. support for Israel is about right, and 7% think the U.S. is not supportive enough.
The poll data were released one day after three Democrats critical of Israel swept their House primary races in New York City, and in races around the country even some reliably pro-Israel Democratic candidates distanced themselves from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.
A survey last year by Gallup found dwindling support for Israel among Democrats, as well as waning support among Republicans.
Still the party divide was also in sharp evidence in the latest poll. In responses to the question about whether the Iran war was “worth it”, Democrats disfavored military action in Iran at 93% and independents at 66%, while 75% of Republicans surveyed thought it was “worth it.”
Given a list of 10 issues and asked which, if any, they considered priorities in their decision-making process in the election for the U.S. House of Representatives, 41% of voters cited the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, above AI data centers (38%) and Donald Trump (38%). The high cost of living (70%) and health care (59%) topped the list.
The Quinnipiac poll was conducted from June 18 to 22, and includes responses from 1,165 self-identified registered voters.
The margin of error is 3.4 percentage points.
Among those surveyed, 48% said they had an unfavorable view of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Twenty percent said they had a favorable opinion, and 30% “haven’t heard enough” about him.
“Netanyahu gets poor marks from American voters as their appetite for supporting Israel wanes, with the share of voters who think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel hitting a new high,” Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy wrote in the report.
Voters were also asked about their views on the June 17 memorandum of understanding with Iran, which begins a 60-day negotiation period that does not outline an end to Iran’s nuclear program.
“After months of diplomatic fits and starts, global economic repercussions and a broad loss of life in the region, a majority of voters make their feelings clear: the Iran war was a bad idea,” Malloy wrote.
Voters who are either not confident or “not so confident” that the deal will succeed numbered 59%, and 61% think it is either likely or very likely that Iran will develop nuclear weapons.
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