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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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Jewish teens see a generational split in their own families over Mamdani
This article was produced as part of the New York Jewish Week’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around New York City to report on issues that affect their lives.
Sixteen-year-old Chase, who lives on the Upper East Side, is close with his grandparents. They talk about school, work and national politics, but there’s one topic he avoids discussing with them: the New York City mayoral election.
He and his grandparents, who are all Reform Jews, have split views on the 34-year-old democratic socialist frontrunner, Zohran Mamdani. Chase, who did not want his last name included so his views would not be searchable to the public, has positive feelings about the candidate, while his grandparents are strongly opposed to him.
Though Chase thinks Mamdani has “good intentions and questionable execution,” he thinks he would probably vote for Mamadani if he could.
His grandparents, on the other hand, have called Mamdani antisemitic — though they don’t go into much detail beyond that, Chase said. While he thinks their perspective lacks nuance, Chase recognizes that his grandparents faced antisemitism when they were growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s, and were sometimes afraid to be openly Jewish. They see Mamdani’s support of Palestine and harsh criticism of Israel as a rejection of Jews. “To them, Israel is supposed to be a bastion against antisemitism,” Chase said.
Chase’s family is just one example of the generational divide among Mamdani’s supporters and detractors. A poll conducted earlier this month by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company Research found that 73% of voters under 30 support Mamdani compared to just 15% for Andrew Cuomo. For voters in the oldest bracket, 65 and older, Cuomo led Mamdani by 43% to 27%.
For New York City Jews, Mamdani’s candidacy also laid bare divisions. An October 29 poll by Quinnipiac University found 60% of Jewish voters supporting Cuomo and 16% of Jewish voters supporting Mamdani. A different poll from July by Zenith Research and Public Progress Solutions found 43% of Jews support Mamdani with the other votes spread across all other candidates. Mandani’s support in this poll came primarily from younger Jews, with two-thirds of Jews aged 18 to 44 supporting Mamdani compared to just a quarter of older Jews.
At issue for many of New York’s Jews is Mamdani’s commitment to anti-Zionist views, which some classify as a threat to Jews. Mamdani has ties to the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanction) movement, and started the first Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College, where he graduated in 2014. During his campaign for mayor, he has claimed Israel committed genocide, and that while he believes Israel has a right to exist as a state, he is “not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.”
Mamdani’s stances on Israel are a quandary for many liberal New York City Jews, many of whom support his domestic policies, like building affordable housing and raising the minimum wage, but are concerned about Jewish safety and the future of the state of Israel.
Sam Rosberger, a 16-year-old Jew from Harlem who sees himself “in the middle” between Reform and Conservative, supports Mamdani’s domestic policies. “I think generally all his ideas are good, I think rent control is good. The 2% tax on people [making] over a million [dollars] is good,” he said. Although Rosberger admits that some of Mamdani’s statements about Israel have been “possibly troubling,” he does not believe the candidate is antisemitic.
However, his parents had a different first impression of Mamdani. They were “worried about him being antisemitic,” based on information and opinion pieces that circulated online, Rosberger said. Once they started listening directly to Mamdani and his messaging, their views began to change. “I don’t think it was something in specific,” Rosberger said. “They saw his actions and they saw what he said, watching debates and hearing his voice [directly].”
Rosberger’s parents also disliked the other candidates running. They thought former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was “not an appealing person on a personal level,” he said, and they have contrasting policy priorities to Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, the radio personality and founder of the Guardian Angels. As a result, Rosberger said his parents supported Mamdani in the primary, and he thinks they will likely vote for him in Tuesday’s general election.
Gershon Leib, a junior at a Manhattan Jewish day school, said his older brother is an anti-Zionist who has canvassed for the Mamdani campaign, something that Leib said his parents are not happy about.
“There was definitely some tension in the family over his decision to do so [to canvas], I could definitely feel that,” Leib, 16, said.
Leib, a former New York Jewish Week Teen Fellow, said both of his parents disapprove of Mamdani. While his stance on Israel-Gaza is part of the problem, he said they are primarily concerned by the state assemblyman’s lack of experience and policy platform, which they disagree with.
Leib, on the other hand, sees Mamdani as “the least bad option.” He’s encouraged by what he sees as the success of other progressive mayors such as Boston’s Michelle Wu — who has implemented free buses and expanded free pre-k — to be a positive sign for Zohran’s policies.
Leib said his parents are concerned that his brother has not done enough research into Mamdani’s policy platform and is only supporting Mamdani because of his anti-Zionist stance.
In the Leib family, the generational divide extends upward to the grandparents as well. Like Chase’s grandparents, they are concerned with Mamdani’s history with the BDS movement. The whole dynamic “has been causing some friction, even at the dinner table,” Leib said.
With the election one day away, the situation with his brother is still a bit of an open wound. “Obviously they [Gershon’s grandparents] did not shut him out entirely,” Leib said, “but I could see tension boiling over who he was willing to support.”
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Jewish lawyer quits Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism task force over Tucker Carlson defense
A prominent Jewish lawyer has quit a national initiative to fight antisemitism over comments by the president of the Heritage Foundation defending Tucker Carlson’s decision to host the white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his popular streaming show.
Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, announced in a letter posted to social media on Sunday that he is quitting the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, convened by the Heritage Foundation, because of Kevin Roberts’ comments last week. The president of the Heritage Foundation both rejected calls to cut ties with Carlson and called conservatives criticizing him “a venomous coalition” within the Republican Party.
Goldfeder wrote that he had joined the national task force, launched in 2023, because he believed it would be nonpartisan, “transcend[ing] politics, ideology, and institutional affiliation.” Roberts’ defense of Carlson, he said, showed that it had departed from those values.
“Elevating him and then attacking those who object as somehow un-American or disloyal in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog whistles, no less, is not the protection of free speech. It is a moral collapse disguised as courage,” wrote Goldfeder, who is also an Orthodox rabbi.
He continued, “It is especially painful that Heritage, an institution with a historic role in shaping conservative policy, would choose this moment to blur the line between worthwhile debate and the normalization of hate.”
The episode comes as Republicans are increasingly divided over how to respond to antisemitism on the right, which many within the party say is surging. Some, including Sen. Ted Cruz, say antisemitism must be forcefully rejected, but other leading Republicans have downplayed the issue or, like Roberts, framed the presence of antisemitic rhetoric as a side effect of free speech.
Goldfeder rejected that idea in his letter.
“Free speech protects the right to speak. It does not compel anyone to provide a megaphone for a Nazi,” he wrote. “Those of us who lead or advise efforts to combat antisemitism have a responsibility to draw that line clearly. If we fail to do so, and if we equivocate when hatred dresses itself in the language of populism, we betray both our mission and our values.”
Goldfeder is not the first Jewish voice on the right to break ties with the Heritage Foundation, a key architect of conservative policy, over Roberts’ comments. Rep. Randy Fine, one of four Jewish Republicans in Congress, announced at the Republican Jewish Coalition convention in Las Vegas over the weekend that he would no longer allow Heritage staffers into his Capitol Hill offices and called on his colleagues to do the same.
Roberts’ video and the backlash has spurred open discord within an organization known for its unified conservative voice. The Free Press reported on Sunday that multiple people affiliated with Heritage had denounced the video on social media, and that Roberts’ chief of staff, seen as responsible for it, had been moved to another position.
Roberts responded to the backlash — and to goading by Fuentes — in a second social media statement late Friday that explicitly denounced Fuentes, citing specific comments in which Fuentes downplayed the Holocaust and called for the death penalty against Jews.
It did not mention Carlson, who is closer to the Republican Party’s mainstream and was the subject of protest at the Republican Jewish Coalition convention.
Rep. Randy Fine addresses the Republican Jewish Coalition’s national conference in Las Vegas, Nov. 1, 2025. (Joseph Strauss)
“Nick Fuentes’s antisemitism is not complicated, ironic, or misunderstood. It is explicit, dangerous, and demands our unified opposition as conservatives. Fuentes knows exactly what he is doing. He is fomenting Jew hatred, and his incitements are not only immoral and un-Christian, they risk violence,” Roberts wrote.
“Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place,” he added. “Join us—not to cancel—but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident as I am that our best ideas at the heart of western civilization will prevail.”
The new statement earned praise from Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, which has long criticized Fuentes and Carlson as elevating antisemitism on the right. The ADL, founded to fight on behalf of Jews facing discrimination a century ago, had criticized the Carlson interview and amplified news reports critical of Roberts’ video.
“Credit to @KevinRobertsTX for stepping forward today and issuing a clear, cogent takedown of the toxic antisemitism and venomous racism expressed by Fuentes,” Greenblatt tweeted. “It was clarifying and crucial to hear firsthand that @heritaghas zero tolerance for this kind of poison.”
For his part, Goldfeder said he believed Heritage was feeling pressure from the antisemitism task force, which is chaired by Jewish and Christian Zionist figures. He also left the door open to a return.
“I want to personally thank the leaders of the task force, many of whom have already spoken up and about the need for Heritage to course-correct before it is too late,” Goldfeder wrote in his resignation letter. “I hope that Heritage will listen and, someday, reclaim the clarity that once defined its best moments. And I look forward to working together again as soon as that day comes.”
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Remains of Omer Neutra, Israeli-American hostage killed on Oct. 7, are returned to Israel
(JTA) — Hamas has returned remains belonging to Omer Neutra, an Israeli-American who was killed while serving in the Israeli army on Oct. 7, 2023, to Israel.
Neutra was one of two Israeli-American soldiers killed that day, along with Itay Chen, whose bodies were still being held by Hamas in Gaza weeks after the start of a ceasefire under which the group was required to release all hostages. Twenty living hostages were released at the ceasefire’s start, but Hamas has released deceased hostages intermittently and with snafus that have tested the truce.
On Sunday, Hamas transferred remains that it said came from three deceased hostages, which if confirmed would reduce the number of Israeli hostages in Gaza to eight. Neutra was the first to be positively identified.
“With heavy hearts and a deep sense of relief — we share the news that, Captain Omer Neutra Z”L has finally been returned for burial in the land of Israel,” his family said in a statement.
Neutra, who was 21 when he was killed, was the son of Israeli parents who grew up on Long Island, where he attended Jewish day school and camp. Following graduation, he moved to Israel and enlisted in the military. He was serving as a tank commander on Oct. 7.
For more than a year, his parents labored under the possibility that he was alive. Orna and Ronen Neutra became prominent faces of the movement to free the hostages, speaking at the Republican National Convention in 2024 as well as at a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition and numerous other forums. They also spoke directly with both U.S. presidents during their son’s captivity, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, in an effort to free their son and the other hostages.
After the Israeli army announced in December 2024 that it had concluded that Neutra had been killed on Oct. 7, his school and Jewish community on Long Island held a memorial service for him, while his town of Plainview named both a street and park for him. But family members continued to lobby for the remaining hostages, to return those who remained alive and give those whose loved ones had been killed the closure they desperately sought.
“They will now be able to bury Omer with the dignity he deserves,” the family’s statement said. “Omer has returned to the land he loved and served. His parents’ and brother’s courage and resolve have touched the hearts of countless people around the world.”
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