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Boro-Park Chasidishe female lawyer, Ruchie Freier, lives in two worlds

Article of her passing the bar



When Rachel Freier opened her office above a deli and a real estate office in a strip mall on Route 17M two years ago, she was no ordinary law school graduate hanging her shingle while studying for the bar exam.

She was a 40-year-old mother of six and a Hasidic Jew. Her budding career was unique: Few people in her intensely religious culture go into law. Too many inducements to assimilate into the secular world are strewn along the path to a law degree, starting with co-ed classrooms and a full schedule of nonreligious courses.

Besides, she was a woman, raised in a culture that teaches girls to become mothers and homemakers, not briefcase-toting professionals.

Becoming an attorney forced Freier to stray outside the usual lines of culture and gender. But don't call her a rebel or the Rosa Parks of Hasidic women, seeking emancipation from the home. Raising a family is her primary purpose, she insists. And immersion in secular life, she says, is rightly discouraged.

Only by praying for divine guidance, she says, does she straddle two worlds.

"I'm the last one out there holding up the banner and saying to Hasidic women, 'Go out there and get a degree,'" she says in her Monroe office. "It's not for most people. They shouldn't do it. I have a very supportive family, and I have a passion for the law."

She grew up in the Orthodox Jewish world of Borough Park, Brooklyn, the oldest of five children. She never planned on a career, and the religious, all-girls high school she attended discouraged her and her classmates from going to college out of fear that some might be tempted to leave the fold.

At 17, she graduated and landed a secretarial job in a Manhattan law office.

It took a while, though, for her ambitions to develop. At 19, she married David Freier, and then came children. She continued working as a legal secretary and paralegal, eventually making her way to the firm of Wilkie Farr & Gallagher in 1994.

She was working there when her husband earned his accounting degree at Touro College in Brooklyn. Rachel, who by then had turned 30, remembers sitting at David's graduation, thinking: "Now it's my turn. Now it's my turn."

She enrolled at Touro, which had separate-gender classrooms, and graduated in six years with a political science degree. Then she went to Brooklyn Law School. In June 2005, her family watched her cross the stage to accept her parchment.

Getting through law school while raising three boys and three girls — including two infants — took a lot of juggling. But the most grueling ordeal came when Freier failed the bar exam and realized she would have to retreat from her family and immerse herself in her studies the second time around.

"It was heartbreaking for me," she recalls. "I had to be like every other law student. I didn't even answer the phone for three months."

Her sacrifice paid off. She took the bar exam again in February 2006; the following month, she learned that she had passed.

Within her own circles, Freier's pursuit of a law career drew mixed reactions. Some were enthusiastic; others asked David why he was letting his wife do what she was doing.

Those who were dismayed might have thought she was turning away from her community and its traditions. But on the contrary, she says, spending her days working and studying in the secular world only heightened her appreciation of Hasidim.

"I would take the train back to 18th Avenue; I was so happy to be home," she says.

At least three days a week, Freier crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in her minivan and heads to Monroe, where she caters largely to the Satmar Hasidic residents of nearby Kiryas Joel. She says she opened her office there because she relished working with such a fervently religious population.

And in a larger sense, she sees herself as an unofficial public advocate for the Hasidim — a group whose insularity has fed misunderstanding and caused it a public-relations problem, in her view.

She desperately wants to lower the hostility sometimes directed at her community — which is why she agreed to be featured in an article. The publicity might strike other Hasidim as immodest, but she says she wanted to lend a human face to her community and thereby chip away at the stereotypes.

One perception she'd like to counter is that Hasidic women — most of whom don't drive or take up careers as she has done — are treated as second-class citizens. Mothers may work if they choose, but being the anchor of the home is the most important job of all, she argues.

"In the Hasidic world," she says, "the girl is really the premium, because you know she's going to be setting the tone of the household."

http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070506/NEWS/705060338/-1/NEWS