Just before the Jewish High Holy Days this fall, Judge Rachel Freier was rushing around her kitchen, as she perpetually is. She had just cooked a salmon dish for Sabbath dinner. She was talking to her daughter in Israel on her headset. She was at a countertop, cutting apples and wrapping tuna salad sandwiches to take to work, because at night court in Brooklyn, where she presides, there’s little to eat that’s kosher.
Stepping outside her townhouse in Borough Park, Brooklyn, she climbed into her purple and white minivan emblazoned with the emblems of the female volunteer emergency medical service she founded in her ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. A trained paramedic, she keeps her medical bags in her vehicle, just in case.
“My car is like my second home,” she said.
This is Ruchie Freier, as friends call her, a 52-year-old Hasidic Jewish grandmother who has blazed a trail in her insular religious community with so much determination that the male authorities have simply had to make room. Eleven years ago, she became one of the first Hasidic female lawyers in Brooklyn, and last November, she was elected as a judge to civil court, making her almost certainly the first female Hasidic elected official in the country. She has done so not by breaking the strict religious rules that govern ultra-Orthodox women’s lives, but by obeying them so scrupulously that there are limited grounds for objection.
“I conformed,” she said in an interview in her spacious living room. “I just found some creative ways to extend what it means to conform.”
Along with her official duties, she serves these days as a kind of diplomat between Hasidic Jews and the secular world, explaining the realities of the courts to the Hasidim and the habits of the Hasidim to the courts. And she has also been using her public platform to warn publicly of what she sees as a grave threat to her community’s survival, an epidemic of lost youth and suicides that is driven, she believes, by an unforgiving culture of judgment among ultra-Orthodox schools and families that she feels needs to change.
Last summer, she wrote a column for Vos Iz Neias, an online Orthodox news source, about Malky Klein, a Hasidic girl who had been expelled from her yeshiva and died of a heroin overdose in June. She quoted anecdotal statistics that estimate 70 Orthodox Jewish children have died of drug overdoses or suicide in the past year.
“What happened in our community; why have so many of our children been cast away — thrown overboard into dangerous and troubled waters?” she wrote. “We need to unite and champion true Torah values to solve our problem.”
Judge Freier speaking with her eldest son in her office at the courthouse. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times
Most Hasidic women do not pursue high-profile success in the outside world. They are taught their most sacred role is to maintain the religious sanctity of their home and raise their children. “What a woman does in order to enhance her glory is not put herself out as an example to other people in the public domain, but rather in private, in the home,” said Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at City University of New York and an expert on the Orthodox and Hasidic communities.
“The men are in the forefront, they run the world, and we are the power behind the throne,” said Pearl Engelman, 70, a great-grandmother in the Satmar Hasidic sect in Williamsburg, who broke that paradigm several years ago by speaking publicly about a cover-up of child sex-abuse cases in the ultra-Orthodox community.
Women are generally permitted to work outside the home to support their families, so long as they comport with religious rules. And Judge Freier felt she could do all that was expected of her as a Hasidic woman — and be a judge, a paramedic and a voice for change, too.
“Everyone was waiting to see, ‘What is she going to do?” Judge Freier said of the wary attitude toward her after she became a judge. “And I’m the same. I dress the same, I still cook and I still bake and I do whatever I always did. Whatever we consider important traditional Hasidic values, I didn’t let go. So I guess it was an eye-opener for everyone.”
“She is a good barometer of how this community is going through a transition,” Mr. Heilman, the sociologist, said. “It might seem glacially slow from the perspective of the outside world, but clearly she is a sign of the growing power of women, of the impact of democracy and an open society.”
A few minutes before her 5 p.m. shift on a recent evening, Justice Freier arrived at Brooklyn Criminal Court on Schermerhorn Street. She is only 5 feet tall, and slender. She was dressed formally, with a dark wig covering her hair to meet the modesty requirements of her sect, and a tailored business suit, its skirt reaching below her knees.
It was a half-hour drive from her home but a universe away from Borough Park, where men with side curls and women pushing strollers speak Yiddish on the streets. Here there were police officers and court officers in bulletproof vests. In a narrow hallway, Judge Freier conferred briefly with another female judge about a case. She was ushered into an elevator used to transport prisoners, and strode to her chambers through a warren of hallways divided by metal fences.
The Freiers’ three daughters; they also have three sons. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times
She will pray, as she does three times a day, before she takes the bench. Her rebbetzin, a female religious mentor such as the wife of a rabbi, had given her a special prayer. “That people shouldn’t malign me or put me in positions, or ask for things I shouldn’t do,” she said. “That I should make the right decisions, because we are all human beings, and don’t have any ability to see the future.”
There are precedents for what Judge Freier has accomplished, but not many. In Israel, a small group of ultra-Orthodox women have formed a political party to run for office, despite opposition from rabbis who still disapprove of women entering public life. In 2013, a Hasidic woman in Montreal ran for a local City Council seat and won. And in the Bible, there is a female judge in the Book of Judges: Devora, or Deborah, a prophetess who calls the Israelites to battle. But there has not been a female ultra-Orthodox judge for centuries, certainly not within the Hasidic movement, which was founded in 18th-century Eastern Europe.
Judge Freier recalled that her rebbetzin told her, “If God gave us Devora, the judge, if we have that in our history, that means that Ruchie Freier should be a judge. That’s it!”
Yet Justice Freier is careful not to call herself a feminist. For her, it is a radical charge that would imply she wants to overstep and reject traditional gender boundaries. That could lead to community members ostracizing her and her family, which could limit her ability, for example, to arrange marriages for her two unmarried daughters.
So she stays away from controversial gender issues. She does not want to be a judge in a religious rabbinical court, a strictly male domain that rules over many civil matters for ultra-Orthodox Jews. She does not pray in the men’s section of the gender-segregated synagogues. She does not want to wear a Tallis, a traditional male prayer shawl, as some Reform Jewish women now do.
“I wanted to succeed, but I wanted to do it from within my community,” she said. “I love Borough Park, I love the people here. I didn’t want to break away.”
Just after 5 p.m., Judge Freier took the bench. She would see a steady stream of turnstile jumpers, low level assault cases, drug users and order-of-protection violators until 1 a.m. A swirl of public defenders, prosecutors and police officers surrounded her.
In addition to her duties at the court, Judge Freier is expected to run her household in Borough Park.
Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times
Night court is the emergency room of criminal court, a tough shift that tends to fall to new judges. On an average night in the misdemeanor part, she will arraign up to 50 men, deciding whether they should be released while awaiting trial or remanded on bail. On that evening, some cases took 5 minutes — the district attorney recommended release, and she agreed. On others, she asked questions for 20 minutes or more.
Judge Freier never expected to be in criminal court. She won a seat in Civil Court. But in New York, an administrative office decides where to put judges, and she was assigned to criminal court a few weeks before she started in January. She has been nonetheless energized by the task.
The New York City judicial system under Mayor Bill DeBlasio is moving toward alternatives to bail, such as vocational training and supervised release, for low-level crimes. Judge Freier has embraced the trend. A young defendant came up, accused of misdemeanor assault of his girlfriend. Judge Freier inquired into his record, and found out that his past offenses consisted of stealing MetroCards and using marijuana. She reduced his bail from $2,500 to $250.
Another man, obviously mentally ill, stood before her. He had exposed himself and masturbated in a Popeye’s restaurant. She took her time and decided to release him before trial with mandated mental health treatment, even though the district attorney recommended he be held on $5,000 bail.
She is inspired by two things, she said later: the possibility of making a positive change for a defendant, and her own volunteer experiences within the ultra-Orthodox community counseling teenagers who had turned to drugs and other vices. She found time and time again that they were not bad children; they were just doing bad things.
“I want you to understand the importance of what’s being offered to you in court,” she told a 17-year-old who had been charged with possession of a knife, offering to dismiss the charges if he stays out of trouble for six months. “I want you to choose your friends, stay in school, do your schoolwork, and stay out of trouble, because you’ve got potential, but it’s in your hands.”
Judge Freier was raised in a traditional ultra-Orthodox home in Borough Park, graduating from an ultra-Orthodox high school for girls that discouraged college. Shortly afterward, she married a Hasidic man, David Freier, and became a legal secretary to support his Judaic studies.
Judge Freier arriving for the night shift at Kings County Criminal Court near Downtown Brooklyn. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times
Then Mr. Freier, who is now a mortgage broker, decided to go to college so he could earn money for the family. That was already a groundbreaking decision among the insular ultra-Orthodox, where even for a man to enroll in a secular university was rare. At his graduation, Mrs. Freier remembers saying to herself, “It’s my turn,” she recounted in a speech to an Orthodox Union women’s group in June. Her husband agreed. Over the next 10 years, she graduated from Touro College, and Brooklyn Law School. By then, she was 40, with six children.
More opportunities have opened up for Hasidic women in recent years, with some women pursuing flexible or online degrees in fields like accounting or special education, even as some ultra-Orthodox rabbis continue to disapprove of college for women. Law school, however, had little precedent.
“At every stage, everyone said, it’s never going to happen,” she told the women’s group.
Even Hasidic women have had mixed feelings about her choices.
“O.K., she’s a superwoman, Ruchie Freier, she’s great, she dresses modestly, her deportment is modest,” said Mrs. Engelman, the Satmar great-grandmother from Williamsburg, explaining the more conservative view of her generation.
“She’s one in a million. But there isn’t this tremendous yearning to want to be like her. We think, ‘I have my career at home, I want to excel in what I am doing.’”
Yet when Judge Freier passed the bar in 2006, her first clients were Hasidic men from the ultra-strict Satmar sect, who needed help with real estate transactions and liked that she spoke Yiddish, she recalled. (Judge Freier, by marriage, is part of the Bobov Hasidic sect.)
Her real estate practice grew. Still, the idea that she could parlay her experience to win a local judicial election was unthinkable. So many factors fell into place to make it happen that her oldest son, Moshe, 30, said he didn’t expect to see such a thing again in his lifetime.
Judge Freier, presiding in Brooklyn’s night court.
For one, it was actually her uncle and mentor, Judge David I. Schmidt, who held the seat she would win in her judicial district, which includes Borough Park. He retired in 2015, after his legal secretary sued him, claiming she was fired in 2014 for complaining about his inappropriate sexual comments in the office.
Then her opponents in the Democratic primary both had legal trouble. The Daily News reported before the September vote that Morton M. Avigdor, who had the support of local Democratic elected officials, had misused more than $500,000 from an estate of which he was an executor. Her other opponent, Jill Epstein, a secular Jew, had been censured by a panel of judges for failing to respond to inquiries on an ethical matter.
Voters “must go with Freier,” The Daily News urged in an editorial.
She ran a spirited but careful campaign. Her Yiddish theme song, broadcast from four S.U.V.’s covered with fliers on Election Day, referred to her as Mrs. Freier, not by her first name. Her fliers didn’t feature her photograph, to avoid charges of immodesty. Her husband, not she, gathered the endorsements of 10 local rabbis, who praised both “Mr. and Mrs. Freier” in a letter for their good works in the community.
Mr. Freier, 56, a soft-spoken man with a graying beard who jokes that he is now referred to as the judge’s husband, said that he thinks her record of service made the difference. “They liked what she did with the ambulance service, the at-risk youth,” he said.
Of all her causes, it is the EMS service about which Judge Freier seems most passionate, perhaps because of the ongoing struggle to keep it alive. Ultra-Orthodox women in Brooklyn had tried to form an all-female emergency service since the 1980s, mostly to help women in emergency birthing situations, she said. But it never happened.
Judge Freier pushed for it. In the years that she worked as an attorney in private practice, she signed up for an emergency medical technician course with her mother, who had always told her she could do anything, “unless it’s illegal, immoral or against the Torah,” she said.
When the powerful male-run Jewish ambulance service, Hatzolah, declined to open to female volunteers at her request in 2011, Judge Freier applied for a license for a separate female EMS service, Ezras Nashim. It opened with some 20 volunteers in 2014. When local rabbis were reluctant to support it publicly, her husband went to Israel and filmed himself getting rabbinical approval from senior sages.
Ezras Nashim, she said, is not about being a feminist, but about reclaiming the traditional role of women to help in their own God-given way. It is the same sentiment that drives her other work. “We aren’t saying the men aren’t good,” Judge Freier said. “But there is something different about us just by the fact that we’re women. We are bringing something that you can’t give.”
The service, which she still leads as director, was recently named EMS agency of the year by the city and state emergency medical service councils. Right now, its women respond in their own cars to emergencies, and they help the 911 ambulance dispatched to the scene. But it is now applying for its own ambulance license and in the coming months will face a public hearing at which Hatzolah and other services can object.
Judge Freier is girding herself for the hearing, even looking forward to it. She has been practicing what she will say.
“I want someone to look me in the face and say that religious women can’t do it,” she said, as she drove to court in her minivan. “I want to see who is going to have the nerve to face me and say, ‘Jewish women aren’t capable.’ I feel bad; I am going to make mincemeat out of that guy.”
