One of the saddest and most shameful stories in Jewish history has been suppressed for generations: between 1860 and 1939, thousands of poor young women from Eastern European shtetls were sold into sexual slavery by the Jewish-run Zwi Migdal crime syndicate, which controlled brothels on several continents. Focusing on three women, Vincent reconstructs the miserable lives of many of these women. One, sent to New York, saw 273 men in a two-week period. Many, unable to find support in the Jewish community-which ostracized them-committed suicide. And one, Sally Knopf, whose own uncle was a trafficker, escaped by disguising herself as a man. There is some triumph here: the Jewish prostitutes of Rio de Janeiro purchased their own cemetery in 1916 and ran their own burial society. By the time they bought their own synagogue in 1942, they had seen the demi\nse of the Zwi Migdal gang.\n\n\nAs polacas cariocas: mulheres judias prostitutas e suas associações de ajuda mútua\n \n\nBeatriz Kushnir, author\nThis text is an abridged version of the book entitled Baile de Máscaras – mulheres judias e prostituição: as polacas e suas associações de ajuda mútua. The author particularly addresses the contents of Chapter 3 (The charity sisterhood),where she has analysed the mutual help society founded by a group of Jewish men and women in the city of Rio de Janeiro. What this group particularly had in common, was the same religious identity and the exercise of their activities in this city’s foreign prostitution trade, mainly within the so-called “red-light districts’.Certainly, it is fundamental to stress that this analyses is an innovating approach, for focusing on an excluded group, always judged by its public appearance, since prostitution was located on the streets, and seeking to reflect on their private worlds. In studying their philanthropic and socializing societies, she presents a different facet of these women.