“60 Minutes” has covered it. So has The New York Times. But still, Israel — and many Jews for that matter — would rather not know the details of how foreign women are kidnapped in their native countries and brought to Israel to work as prostitutes.
Nomi Levenkron wants Israelis to know. And she wants Jews to know, too. The 35-year-old attorney has made it her life’s work to help the prostitutes and change the laws to make the trafficking of women — as the practice is known — a crime in Israel, which it wasn’t until 2000.
Levenkron, widely considered the foremost expert on the trafficking of women in Israel, will be speaking in the Bay Area March 15 and 16, including at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco. The head of the legal department of the Tel Aviv-based Hotline for Migrant Workers, she teaches courses on the trafficking of foreign workers in five Israeli universities and colleges.
The New Israel Fund, which aids the Hotline for Migrant Workers, is bringing Levenkron to the Bay Area. Although much of the hotline’s work is in helping prostitutes, it also assists any foreign workers who may need assistance, whether they are in Israel legally or not.
Levenkron was in law school when she was asked to help foreign workers in Israel. She had an asset considered priceless for this line of social work: fluency in Romanian. (Levenkron had immigrated to Israel from Romania with her family when she was 5.)
“I knew there were poor migrant workers in prison, but that was all,” she said in a telephone interview from Israel. “And at first, they only had me asking the small questions.”
Now, Levenkron is asking the bigger questions.
In a report she co-authored in 2003 called “Women as Commodities,” the testimony of many victims is cited, and from that, Levenkron and her co-authors have a good idea how the process works.
The men in charge are Russian Jewish immigrants in Israel. They maintain contacts back home and in other parts of the former Soviet Union, where there is little work. They seek out naive, attractive young women and promise them good jobs in foreign countries, where they will be able to earn enough money to send some back home to their families. Once the women agree, they are flown from their native countries to Cairo. There, in groups of six to eight, they are met by Bedouin smugglers, and their passports are taken away, she said.
“These are not the Bedouin we used to know,” said Levenkron. “They have cell phones and jeeps and weapons.”
The women usually guess what they are in for by the way they are treated by the smugglers. One woman, with the initials Y.B. testified: “I tried to run away but a Bedouin got hold of me and beat me. In the evening, four Bedouin raped me, one after the other. I was bleeding and I couldn’t walk; it hurt so much, I wanted to die.”
The border with Egypt is porous, said Levenkron, because it is a peaceful border, and therefore the Israeli army presence there is minimal. “Many weapons and drugs are smuggled into Israel through Egypt too, but the army focuses on what it thinks is important,” she said.
Once the women arrive in Israel, they are “auctioned” off to brothel owners.
A former brothel owner, who later turned into an informant, testified, “When the girl comes, her boss immediately has sex with her. He has to be the first to check her out. Maybe she just doesn’t know how to work? Maybe she doesn’t know how to pamper the client, make him feel good?”
In some of the worst cases that Levenkron has heard, women are forced to see more than 30 clients a day, even during menstruation.
One woman, M.P., testified, “The woman pimp made it quite clear to me right from the outset that I wouldn’t be allowed time off during my period, because I already owed them a great deal of money and it would take me a lot of time to repay the debt. She gave me a diaphragm and explained to me how to use it in order to prevent the blood from leaking out.”
Whatever money the women are given, they must spend on food or contraception. And if they try to escape, their family back home is threatened by people who know where they live, she said.
Israel made trafficking a crime in 2000, after Amnesty International published a report condemning the Jewish state for its lax attitude in dealing with the problem. But it wasn’t until 2001, when the U.S. State Department put Israel on a list of countries that was not doing enough to combat the problem, that Israel reacted. Only then, it began going after the traffickers. It was forced into action, since United States law forbids giving humanitarian aid to countries on that list.
While Israel has come a long way since then, largely due to the hotline’s efforts, Levenkron says it is still nowhere near enough.
“There is still complete denial, that these things don’t happen here. But we still see a lot of evil being done.”
The issue of trafficking foreign women into Israel to work as prostitutes is of such magnitude that numerous Jewish organizations are co-sponsoring Levenkron’s appearance here, including the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council, Jewish Family and Children’s Services, the National Council of Jewish Women, Progressive Jewish Alliance, Shalom Bayit and Women’s Interfaith Dialogue on the Middle East.
Just recently, Levenkron said, she took a group of students to the area near the old bus station in Tel Aviv. “We found 25 brothels, all of them open for business. All of the women are from the [former Soviet Union]. Everyone can see the women are not from here, but no one cares.”
Some experts estimate there are around 3,000 trafficked women in Israel at any given time, but Levenkron doesn’t like to rely on those statistics, because there really is no way to know. Some 850 such women were deported from the country last year, she said.
For these women, the hotline is often the only place where they can turn to find help.
In talking to the women, Levenkron learned that most of their clients are Israeli.
“They are always trying to blame the others, and say, ‘It’s the Thai workers, it’s not our people,’ but you can’t have a sex industry only based on tourists. You need to have local people coming to have a real market, and in Israel we have a real market.”
Levenkron said that religious men are among the clients, as well as soldiers, who know which brothels give discounts to them if they come in uniform.
She admitted that her work has taken an emotional toll. “You can see these things thousands of times, but it still upsets me so much each time. We laugh about it a lot. We’re all so burnt out. We’re not the same people we used to be before we entered this line of work.”
The hotline has many volunteers — mostly law students — who answer the phones and are often the first friendly ear a prostitute has encountered since her ordeal began.
“I keep explaining to the volunteers, ‘It’s not easy. You’re helping these poor women, but it’s dirty. It’s not so glamorous as it looks from the outside. It takes everything you’ve got, and if you can’t give 100 percent, don’t bother starting.'”
At her World Affairs Council appearance, Levenkron will be joined by Kavitha Sreeharsha of the Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach, a co-sponsor, who will give a local perspective. The SAGE Project is another co-sponsor.
Nomi Levenkron will speak 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 16, at the World Affairs Council of San Francisco, 312 Sutter St., Suite 200. Admission: $5 students, $7 co-sponsors, $15 general. Information: www.itsyourworld.org. She also will speak Tuesday, March 15, at a private home in Los Altos Hills, and at a luncheon for attorneys on Wednesday, March 16. Information: (415) 543-5055.