With the destruction of the AMIA building, a huge archive of Jewish history in Argentina was destroyed. However, police and court records regarding Zwi Migdal can be found in other venues, such as the 1925–1926 files of Zacarias Zytnitzky, then president of Zwi Migdal, which had been stored in a private home.

Talia Carner thanks the authors and researchers who had viewed these Spanish- and Yiddish-language documents for distilling the information and thus helping her study this most shameful chapter in Jewish history.

About the Book

The Historical Background of The Third Daughter

This novel is set in Buenos Aires during a time when prostitution was legal in Argentina and the Varsovia (Warsaw) Society, which later changed its name to Zwi Migdal, operated as a mutual-aid union of Jewish pimps. The organization had a hierarchical structure and a strong internal code of ethics, and it spread throughout South America, with tentacles reaching India, China, South Africa, Germany, Poland, Turkey, and even New York City’s Lower East Side. It operated with impunity from the early 1870s until 1939, when Jews could no longer travel to Central and Eastern Europe.

Zwi Migdal’s method of kidnapping women for prostitution was as described in this novel: well-dressed men, speaking Yiddish and flaunting their success, would return to their native Eastern European countries on recruitment expeditions subsidized by the union. They offered marriages and jobs in the New World.

Four hundred years of the persecution of Jews in Europe through official anti-Semitic policies had severely restricted Jewish work occupations, land ownership, and permitted places of residence. Furthermore, these policies were coupled with repeated bloody pogroms in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland. (In 1918–1919 alone more than 1,200 pogroms took place in Ukraine, and a pogrom was even reported in 1904 in Ireland.) The unrelenting savagery and slaughter to which the Jews were subjected made them vulnerable to the charm of the traffickers and their promises.

The victims, girls and women ranging in age from their early teens to early thirties, were repeatedly raped and beaten, caged, starved, and physically tortured. By the time their ocean voyage ended three to four weeks later, they were broken. There are no records of the suicide rate during this early stage of the “training.” But in Inhaúma cemetery in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, established by the local Jewish prostitutes, a large, separate section for suicide victims—as ordained by Jewish burial customs—tells the tragic story of many of these women once they were put to work. In the rest of the cemetery, the disproportionate number of tombstones of prostitutes who died in their twenties and thirties reveals the fate of the rest of them.