The world premiere of the highly anticipated bilingual musical production of Las Polacas:  The Jewish Girls of Buenos Aires, which was commissioned by GALA, with book by Patricia Suárez-Cohen, music and lyrics by Mariano Vales, and directed by Mariano Caligaris. Adaptation of English lyrics and text is by Bari Biern and Music Director is George Fulgitini-Shakar. The production will runJune 4 through June 28, 2015at GALA Theatre, 3333 14^thStreet, NW, Washington, DC 20010. Parking is available behind the theatre at the Giant garage on Park Road for $4.

Through the stories of Rachela, we experience the dreams, losses, and struggles of thousands of Polish-Jewish women who were lured into prostitution in Argentina by a slave trading organization in the early 1900s.  With haunting Slavic melodies and passionate tangos, this original bilingual musical underscores the strength and perseverance of women uprooted from their homeland and enslaved in a foreign culture.

The Zwi Migdal Organization lured girls and young women from poor Jewish villages in Poland or Russia using various ruses. In one, a distinguished man would appear in the village and place an ad at the local synagogue for young women to work in the homes of wealthy Jews in Argentina. Hoping that their daughters would escape the bleak economic situation at home, the parents would send them away with the men. Another popular scheme was to find attractive girls and marry them in quick ceremonies known in Yiddish as “shtille chupah.” The girls would leave their families and board ships to Argentina in search of what they believed to be a better life. This, however, was not the case. Their training as sex slaves began on the ship or they were married to local men in order to obtain entry visas.

The organization operated from the 1860s to 1939, but had its peak in the 1920s.  At that time 430 pimps controlled 2,000 brothels with 30,000 women in Argentina.  Prostitutes who failed to satisfy their clients were beaten, fined or sent to work in provincial homes. These activities went undisturbed, as many of the clients were government officials and journalists, until 1929, when one brave prostitute, Raquel Liberman, reported the operation to a sympathetic judge and the group was exposed  The Jewish community publically condemned Zwi Migdal in the press and established the Jewish Association for the Protection of Children and Women.