The Impure written and directed by Daniel Najenson; Spanish, Hebrew, and Yiddish with English subtitles; 69 minutes; to be shown during the San Diego International Jewish Film Festival at 4 p.m., Monday, February 11, at the Reading Cinemas Town Square, 4665 Clairemont Drive, San Diego.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – In the shtetls of Eastern Europe, girls and young women were warned not to go out alone at night, lest they be grabbed by white slavers from Argentina. A song in Yiddish featured a girl refusing the blandishments of a man who offered to take her away from the poverty of her village to a new life in Buenos Aires. However, the awful fact of the matter was that many young Jewish women, either through trickery or abduction, were transported from Eastern Europe to Buenos Aires during the late 19th and early 20th centuries where they were forced to parade naked at an auction among brothel operators. Once purchased, they were threatened or beaten until they submitted to their fate as prostitutes in a country where not only was the practice legal, but where, for a while, it was practically celebrated.
The origins of Argentina’s flourishing prostitution trade lay in the fact that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries some 6 million immigrants came to Argentina looking for work. Most were men. Of these, perhaps 100,000 were Jews from Poland and Russia Within that group were criminals, who understood enough about supply and demand to realize how much profit could be derived from women who could satisfy the sexual cravings of single men. A syndicate created an industry around sex; there were strip clubs, gambling halls, porn cinemas, and of course brothels. Many brothels even had their own currency—a token paid for a full night at the brothel, and men received them as gifts from politicians as election bribes.
The organization behind the brothels was called Zwi Migdal after one of its founders. When a census of prostitutes in Buenos Aires was taken in 1910, there were more than 2,700 whose countries of origin were listed as either Poland or Russia. A majority of them were Jewish. In opposition to Zwi Migdal was another organization known as Ezrat Nashim, which tried to help the women who had been exploited. Records of that organization included 6,000 appeals for help.
Whereas once pimps proudly escorted their prostitutes, dressed in finery, to the Yiddish Theatre; this practice was frowned upon by the upstanding members of the community. It was unthinkable that someone’s wife or mother should have to sit in the theater next to a rouged prostitute, and so the women and their pimps were banned. Members and workers for the Zwi Migdal organization similarly were banned from membership in the synagogues, from the social organization AMIA, and even from burial in Jewish cemeteries. Yet in all this there was an element of hypocrisy. The butchers who supplied meat to the brothels, the tailors who provided clothes, the laundries that washed the sheets and pillowcases, and numerous other businesses profited by their sales to the brothels.
Filmmaker Daniel Najenson’s own family had a connection to Zwi Migdal. His great aunt was a brothel owner, it was admitted very uncomfortably in an interview he conducted with Perla Deri across the kitchen table. It was something that the family did not talk about. Why rake up all that muck now?
In the early 20th century, Raquel Liberman came to Argentina from Lodz, Poland, to be with her husband, a tailor. He died within a year of her arrival, leaving her destitute. Her search for work landed her in a brothel, from which she eventually purchased her freedom. She opened a shop, but the Zwi Migdal organization did not like the example that she set for prostitutes under their control. Solomon Korn who secretly worked for Zwi Migdal married her, took away her money, and forced her back into prostitution. She was able to contact Manuel Rodriguez Ocampo, one of the few prosecutors who had not been bribed by Zwi Migdal, and with her help, he ordered a general roundup of pimps, who were prosecuted and jailed, although most of them subsequently were released on appeal. Nevertheless, organized prostitution rings were banned in Argentina, although individual prostitution was permitted. Liberman became a symbol of prostitutes’ liberation.
Prostitution was reinstated in Argentina, although in less garish form. As a teenager, Sonia Sanchez was forced into prostitution, and in a dramatic visit to the Ideal Hotel—which once was known as the brothel of Madam Sofo—she sat in a room similar to one in which she was imprisoned and told of her humiliation and the violence to which she had been subjected as a prostitute. “Men take you violently,” she cried. She never thought of herself as a “sex worker” or any other euphemism. “I saw myself as a whore.”
Today, Sanchez is a campaigner against prostitution, who helps to organize demonstrations debunking the concept that prostitution is a matter of free choice, a victimless pursuit. Her personal testimony is riveting.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com