Raquel Liberman

Raquel Liberman, 1930

Raquel Liberman (born July 10, 1900 in Berditschew , Russian Empire , today Ukraine , † April 7, 1935 in Buenos Aires ) was a prostitute who became known in Argentina when the pimp organization Zwi Migdal was broken up .

Liberman was of Russian-Jewish origin and was born in Berdichev, then part of the Russian Empire. When she was a child, the family emigrated to Poland , where the seamstress Raquel Liberman married the tailor Yaacov Ferber in Warsaw in 1919 . In 1921 Ferber traveled to Tapalqué , Argentina , where his sister and her husband lived. In October 1922, Raquel Liberman followed with their two sons and found her husband in poor health. A few months later he died. Raquel Liberman gave the children to her brothers-in-law's neighbors and tried to find work in the Yiddish-speaking community in Buenos Aires.

According to Nora Glickman, it is not documented how Raquel Liberman got into prostitution. Single women who came to Buenos Aires unaccompanied could be recruited by pimps or kidnapped into brothels . Liberman was later to tell the authorities that she had traveled directly from Warsaw to Buenos Aires in 1924, accompanied by a pimp who had forced her into prostitution. She should keep quiet about her children and the deceased husband. What is certain is that she worked for a pimp named Jamie Cissinger, to whom she had to give a percentage of her income. After five years, she opened an antique shop with the money she had saved. When a man was sent after her to use physical force to force her back into prostitution, she turned to the police on December 29, 1929.

Liberman married José Salomón Korn in a synagogue that housed the headquarters of the Zwi Migdal, which Glickman said she did not know. After the marriage, Korn took away her property and forced her to go back to work in the brothel. After trying unsuccessfully to regain her property, Liberman again turned to the police with the help of Ezrat Nashim and testified against Zwi Migdal in front of Chief Inspector Julio Alsogaray. In 1930, after Hipólito Yrigoyen was overthrown by José Félix Uriburu , the attitude of the authorities towards prostitution changed. Zwi Migdal was smashed, 108 of 434 members were convicted, and many fled the country. In 1935 prostitution should be banned in Argentina. Raquel Liberman died of cancer in a hospital in Buenos Aires in 1935.

Raquel Liberman became a myth, according to Nora Glickman. Their actions "represent the struggle of the subjugated woman who wants her own freedom and the struggle of the victims against the mafia of the exploiters." Humberto Costantini took her as a model for his unpublished "Rapsodia de Raquel Liberman," which he provided with a fictional life story, and wrote a number of poems in her memory. Carlos Luis Serrano wrote the play "Raquel Liberman .. una historia de Pichincha", which premiered in 1988, in which Liberman was sold to human traffickers in her Polish village. In 1993, Myrtha Schalom created a TV miniseries called »Te llamarás Raquel«, in which the story of Liberman is told in fictional form. Glickman's 1993 play Una tal Raquel was written on the basis of Glickman's own research on Liberman. She also wrote the non-fiction book The Jewish White Slave Trade and the True Story of Raquel Liberman, which appeared in 2000.

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