The oldest profession in the world is rapidly being taken up by the newest immigrants to Israel, according to newspaper reports.
Over the last two weeks, Israel’s leading papers have published several articles on the growing phenomenon of young Soviet women turning to prostitution in order to earn a living for their children and sometimes, even, for their husbands.
While no official report has been issued on this very unofficial subject, one owner of a large Tel Aviv escort service estimates that Soviet women constitute some 10 to 15 percent of the total number of women in Israel working in the sex industry, be it in massage parlors, escort services or street prostitution.
“In Tel Aviv, there are a total of 100 to 150 women working at escort services, 200 to 250 masseuses and some 500 whores,” said the owner of V.I.P. Claiming he is “no expert,” he added that he does not think the percentage of Soviet women in the trade is that high.
His view was echoed by Yuli Kosharovsky, a well-known former prisoner of Zion who now lives in the religious kibbutz Alon Shvut in the Etzion Bloc, southeast of Jerusalem.
“A whole people is immigrating to Israel, so what can you expect? All of them would be musicians, professors and ‘good Jews’?” he asked the daily Ma’ariv last week.
While the phenomenon is already common in the center of the country and in the North, the southern parts of Israel still lag behind.
But one escort service office in Beersheba was found to have a Russian woman working for it. Patricia is a 27-year-old childless divorcee who arrived in the country only three months ago.
The owner, who claims to have Soviet women coming to him daily for jobs, told one of the papers that he “saw immediately that she has a lot of class and is suitable for the job.”
“She wants to make enough money to buy a apartment and has already managed to save up a couple of thousands of shekels,” he claimed.
SOME SEVERELY BEATEN UP
Other women have not fared as well as Patricia. In Carmiel, near Haifa, which has one of the highest percentages of new immigrants from the Soviet Union, there are stories circulating about Soviet prostitutes who have been severely beaten up by men trying to be their pimps.
According to reports, the clients of these Soviet prostitutes in the North seem to be mostly Arabs, something which police consider to be a security risk.
In different interviews given to newspapers, the women all claimed to have been working in other professions while in the Soviet Union. One was an architect, another an engineer. But all said they had been unable to find work in their professions in Israel and had only turned to prostitution as a last resort.
Both the Jewish Agency and the Absorption Ministry place only the slightest importance on the phenomenon.
Gad Ben-Ari, the Jewish Agency spokesman, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that prostitution appears to be “the exception and not the rule to an otherwise very high-quality aliyah.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
