Brooklyn elects America’s first hasidic woman judge

For much of her adult life, Rachel Freier has been a trailblazer in her hasidic community in Borough Park: a lawyer, an advocate for higher education, the founder of an all-female ambulance service and of a nonprofit to aid underprivileged mothers during the Gulf War.

Now she has blazed a new trail, this time on a national stage, becoming the first hasidic women elected to public office in the United States.

Last month, Freier was the victor in the race for judge in the 5th Judicial District Civil Court, State of New York, serving Borough Park and other sections of Brooklyn including Bensonhurst and Coney Island.

“It feels great. It feels wonderful!” said Freier, 51, known as “Ruchie” to her friends and family, when asked about her victory. “I feel grateful to G-d that He allowed me to reach this position.”

Freier is OK with “trailblazer,” but don’t call the mother of six and a gradmother a feminist.

“I’m not here to fight to be equal to men,” she explains. “Judaism puts women on a platform. … When the Sabbath comes, I have my mitzvos, I light my candles and say my prayers. My husband goes to the synagogue and davens with the men. I’m not going to say I’m going to fight for his mitzvah.”

Freier wants other women, particularly in hasidic Orthodox communities, to take her example.

“I hope that in the future, more women from my background will realize that it’s not mutually exclusive, that you can have goals and achieve them without compromising any of the standards we have,” she said.

Freier, who grew up in Brooklyn, attended Brooklyn Law School part time while raising a family, eventually practicing law in offices in Brooklyn and update Monroe, and serving on the community board in Borough Park, making a mark on her community even before her election as judge. When she saw that the hasidic yeshiva system sometimes left students insufficiently educated to cope in the wider world, she took action, founding B’Derech in conjunction with Bramson College.

Since 2013, B’Derech (Hebrew for “on the path”) permits yeshiva-educated men to obtain their high school equivalency diplomas and even associate degrees, thus positioning them more competitively in the job market, while retaining close ties with their religious communities.

Shortly after founding B’Derech, some women came to her in need of assistance.

Communities in Jerusalem and in the New York enclave of Kiryat Joel rely on female volunteer EMTs to assist women in childbirth and other medical emergencies. While Jewish law permits men to perform these functions in a health care crisis, devout women who have made tznius a cornerstone of their identity prefer women.

When a group of Brooklyn women reached out to Freier for assistance in creating their own volunteer EMT corps, she responded by obtaining her own certification as an emergency medical technician and the support of some religious and community leaders, including Assemblyman Dov Hikind.

The Borough Park women’s corps, Ezras Nashim (literally “women’s aid”), funds its own training and emergency gear. The service recently announced plans to expand into Crown Heights.

Along the way, Freier has earned awards for pro bono service to the family courts, sat on Bar Association committees and founded Chasdei Devorah, a nonprofit relief organization in memory of a young friend.

During her undergraduate years, she spent hours in the Civil Court presided over by her uncle, Judge David Schmidt. New York State requires attorneys to have practiced at least a decade before standing in for a judgeship. Schmidt’s retirement in 2015 happened to coincide with Freier’s 10th year of practice.

To Freier, this was an example of hashgacha pratis, the hand of G-d guiding circumstances.

So the path was clear but the incline steep. Freier’s principal opponent was Mordechai Avigdor, well-known, connected and Orthodox. Rounding out the field was a candidate with a more secular background, Jill Epstein.

For help in her uphill battle, Freier reached out to Yossi Gestetner of Axle Communications and Gary Tilzer to manage her campaign. Tilzer, known for bucking the party machine, already was managing Odessa Kennedy’s boroughwide campaign for civil court.

“I put Ruchie together with Odessa to campaign in Bay Ridge and Sunset Park,” Tilzer said. “Odessa did very well among Irish Catholic and Asian voters there and brought in votes for Ruchie at the same time.”

Freier may have been expected to face some backlash from the more conservative elements of the Borough Park religious community, but that did not appear to be the case.

“We had a dozen rabbinical voices who publicly backed the candidacy in addition to women leaders who also backed the candidacy,” Gestetner said. “Multiple Yiddish-language publications actually interviewed the candidate and were very fair to her. The vote in Borough Park was split in half. Such a vote outcome is a huge success for a first-time, non-establishment, woman candidate. So not only was there no backlash, there were thumbs-up all around.”

Schmidt, who had told Freier, “If you still want to be a judge, now is your chance” when he retired, advised her strategically. She succeeded despite lacking endorsements from any of the big three area politicians — Hikind, City Council member David Greenfield and State Sen. Simcha Felder.

If anything, Tilzer said, it was the absence of endorsements by the party luminaries that gave Freier a leg up in Borough Park.

“While I was running on the anti-establishment ticket, I’m not anti-establishment,” Freier explained. “People told me that they couldn’t endorse me, but they were voting for me.”

Along with several Jewish and Yiddish-language publications, the Daily News endorsed Freier.

Nevertheless, “We didn’t see it coming,” Freier said of the election victory. “We had no idea. Our celebration was completely spontaneous.”

“The important thing was to do this without compromising my family,” she added.