Judge Ruchie, the Hasidic Superwoman of Night Court
'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.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/nyregion/judge-ruchie-the-hasidic-superwoman-of-night-court.html?
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