TEL AVIV — Zehava Gal-On went slumming Sunday night. As head of the Knesset Committee of Inquiry into Trafficking in Women, she and two other members of the nine-person committee took the press on a fact-finding tour of Tel Aviv’s brothels.
Shuki Baleli, vice squad chief for the Tel Aviv District, was the tour guide for Gal-On, fellow Knesset members Marina Solotzkin and Tamar Gozansky, and the journalists.
He took the group to a small brothel, The Palace Club near the Diamond Exchange, where three women were working. They then visited a larger establishment at the Yitzhak Sadeh section of town, where 12 women sat waiting for clients in the Banana Health Club.
“The point of this tour,” said Gal-On, “is to see firsthand the places and the conditions, and to hear what the women feel.”
Baleli said he is concerned about the state of the women’s health. They rarely go to a doctor unless they are in pain, he said. “If they die, no one will even know who they are.”
Gal-On said the situation constitutes a “modern-day slave trade, and the sentences for the pimps are not harsh enough, as judges still do not take this matter seriously enough. They pay more attention to drug dealing and murder. At the worst, [the pimps] spend a couple of years in jail, but they make a fortune.”
In the Banana Health Club, there were rooms with velvet-covered beds and built-in showers. Some rooms had hiding places under the beds in case of a raid, while others had secret passageways behind mirrors for a quick escape.
Bijou, the pimp at the Palace Club, said the women make approximately $37 for a half-hour’s work, which is split 50-50 with him. Gal-On, however, doubted his version, adding that at a similar place in Eilat, one pimp told her the women make $30, but that his take was five times greater.
Baleli said the women receive a maximum of 20 percent of the take. Nevertheless, they are better off financially than they were at home in the former Soviet Union, he said.
Angela, a 24-year-old from Moscow, said that even though her entire family is in the former Soviet Union, she prefers to be in Israel. “Life is better,” she said. “I don’t know what else I could do.”
There are an estimated 250 brothels in the Tel Aviv region, the largest number in the country. Yet Pini Aviram, head of the team that investigates these cases, decries the fact that his unit consists of only four members, all Russian-speakers. “Our problem is manpower. We need people who can speak to the people in their own language, and properly interrogate them.”
The tour was supposed to carry on to the old central bus station area, but the Knesset members decided they had seen enough.