Zwi Migdal (Yiddish: צבי מגדל, IPA: [ˈtsvɪ mɪɡˈdal] Polish: Cwi Migdał) was a criminal organisation founded by Jews in Poland in the 19th century, based mainly in Argentina.

It had branch offices in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Santos), the United States (New York City), Poland (Warsaw), South Africa, India and China.

The ruffians held a "meat market" where newly arrived girls were paraded naked in front of traders in places such as Hotel Palestina and Cafe Parisienne.

Zwi Migdal's attempt to relocate to Rio, after events in Buenos Aires (discussed below), caused an increased battle against the group among Brazilian Jews.

Slipping into his office one day, she gave detailed testimony on the workings of Zwi Migdal, thus enabling the police to launch an extensive investigation.

"The very existence of the Zwi Migdal Organization directly threatens our society," wrote Ocampo in his verdict, handing down long prison sentences.

In Rio de Janeiro the brothels were concentrated in a few streets near downtown, in the Mangue neighborhood, a city zone where prostitution was segregated and legally authorized.

Society of True Charity), formally registered as "Associação Beneficente Funerária e Religiosa Israelita" – ABFRI (Jewish Benevolent Association for Burial and Religion).

It was led by one of their own elected freely and called "Irmã Superiora" ("superior sister"), who worn a large blue ribbon across her chest during reunions and feasts.

The Buenos Aires police enforcement, led by Julio Alsogaray, dealt a heavy blow to Jewish crime syndicates that affected their activities even in Brazil.

Deeply religious, she made her mission to perform the sacred tahara ceremony of washing the dead and provide a proper Jewish burial for all her "sisters".

[19] As French pimps mainly from Marseille also bought women from to work as prostitutes in Brazil, the word "francesa" (Frenchwoman) also suffered the same fate, but it is still used in Brazilian Portuguese without a pejorative meaning.

The word "encrenca", nowadays meaning trouble, derived from the Yiddish "en krenk" (a sick one, similar to the German "ein Kranker"), and originally referred to a man with venereal diseases.

The 1979 film Last Embrace by Jonathan Demme (based on the novel The Thirteenth Man by Murray Teigh Bloom and a screenplay by David Shaber[22]) features a woman who, taking the role of the biblical avenger Goel Hadam, serially kills descendants of members of the New York Lower East Side Zwi Migdal who had enslaved her grandmother.

[23] The film's heroine assumes the identity of an Eastern European woman traveling to Buenos Aires to meet a prospective husband and in the process gets herself caught up in the prostitution network.

The 2001 film Sonhos Tropicais ("Tropical Dreams"), directed by André Sturm, also deals with the same topic, following Esther, a Jewish girl from Poland lured into a false promise of marriage, who finds herself enslaved in brothels in Rio de Janeiro from 1899 to 1904.

The 2006 novel El infierno prometido by Argentine writer Elsa Drucaroff tells the story of Dina, who falls prey to the Zwi Migdal.

In a nod to Sholem Aleichem's The Man from Buenos Aires, Carner brings us Batya, the third daughter of a dairyman in the Russian countryside, a fourteen-year-old fleeing anti-Semitic pogroms with her family.

Desperate, her father leaps at the opportunity to marry Batya to a worldly, wealthy stranger who guarantees his daughter a comfortable life and passage to America.

But innocent Batya soon discovers her father has been duped as she is shipped as a sex-slave to Buenos Aires, a city where Zwi Migdal operates with impunity as prostitution is not only legal, but a pillar of the growing Argentinian economy.

The 2024 novella The Sailor & The Porteña by Nicholas Warack, Zwi Migdal acts as a primary antagonist throughout the story with its members and organization referred to as "the ruffians."