Raquel Liberman

Raquel Liberman has been the inspiration for a number of authors. Nora Glickman's book The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman is a historical account. Writer and poet Ilan Sheinfeld has also written an account of that time, The Tale of a Ring. Humberto Costantini died before he could complete a fictionalized account, Rapsodía de Raquel Liberman, which he had hoped would "justify [him] in the eyes of God". Carlos Luis Serrano wrote a play about her, Raquel Liberman: una historia de Pichincha. The novel THE THIRD DAUGHTER (HarperCollins, 2019) by Talia Carner is a penetrating look into early 20th-century sex-trafficking taking the cue from Sholem Aleichem's "The Man from Buenos Aires." Myrtha Shalom wrote the book La Polaca. Argentine-born film-maker Gabriela Bohm has produced a 30-minute documentary about her, entitled Raquel: a marked woman.

In Argentina, as of June 2010, the Raquel Liberman award was created to honor those who promote and protect the rights of survivors of violence against women.

In 1934 Liberman applied for a visa to return to Poland. The trip never took place since several months later, on 7 April 1935, she died of thyroid cancer at the age of 34.

The magistrate ordered the detention of 108 members of the Zwi Migdal and the arrest of 334 fugitives on charges of corruption and conspiracy. The lengthy trial ended in September 1930, with 108 criminal convictions. "The very existence of the Zwi Migdal Organization directly threatens our society", Judge Ocampo wrote in his verdict, handing down long prison sentences.

Liberman escaped a second time and on 31 December 1929 she denounced the Zwi Migdal to Inspector of Police Julio Alsogaray. Her judicial complaint was the first to publicly expose these criminal networks in Argentina and evolved into the dissolution of the human trafficking network.

After Liberman escaped the second time, she contacted Julio Alsogaray, a policeman with a reputation for integrity, and with him on 31 December 1929 filed a complaint in court. The commissary asked if she was determined to make her declaration to the magistrate and she affirmed: "I can only die once, I won't withdraw the complaint". The criminal court magistrate Manuel Rodríguez Ocampo called Liberman to testify. Her testimony brought to light the criminal organization's methods, where women were forcibly transported from one place to another, and constantly abused physically and psychologically to make them subservient and prevent them from denouncing the organization.

Raquel Liberman (10 July 1900 – 7 April 1935) was a Polish immigrant to Argentina, a victim of human trafficking. Her denouncement of her traffickers led to the breaking up of the Jewish human-trafficking network from Poland, Zwi Migdal, which in the early 20th century operated a worldwide white-slavery ring.

Liberman was born on 10 July 1900 in Berdichev in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire. According to the Jewish Women's Archive, she moved to Warsaw in Russian Poland with her family as a child. In 1919, she married Yaacov Ferber, a Warsaw tailor, according to Jewish rites. Ferber emigrated to Argentina and she followed him to Tapalqué, Buenos Aires province, with her two sons in 1922. Her husband died of tuberculosis soon after their arrival. Needing economic support and not knowing Spanish, Liberman left her children with a foster family and looked for a job in Buenos Aires. Liberman later kept the existence of her children a secret, and her children were unaware of her subsequent history.