NEW YORK — In some ways, Rachel Freier has a background that might be expected in a new civil-court judge. She is a real estate lawyer who volunteers in family court and in her community, where she even serves as a paramedic.
But Freier starts work Tuesday as something quite unexpected. She’s believed to be the first woman from Judaism’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community to be elected as a judge in the United States.
A proud product of a world with strict customs concerning gender roles and modesty, the new Brooklyn civil-court judge started college as a married, 30-year-old mother of three children and had three more before graduating.
A trailblazer who embraces tradition, she has sometimes had to explain herself to both outsiders and fellow believers.
‘‘My commitment to the public and my commitment to my religion and my community — the two can go hand in hand,’’ she says.
At a swearing-in ceremony last month, she both vowed to uphold the Constitution and pledged to illuminate the Hasidic world for her new colleagues. ‘‘This is a dream,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s the American dream.’’
New York is among the states where judges are elected. There’s no official tally of American judges’ religions, but experts aren’t aware of any Hasidic woman before Freier winning a judicial post. It is extremely rare even in Israel for Hasidic or other ultra-Orthodox women to hold any elected position.
Freier, a political newcomer whose uncle is a former judge, won a three-way Democratic primary and the general election in a swath of Brooklyn that includes the heavily Hasidic Borough Park neighborhood.
Her election is ‘‘a step for the ultra-Orthodox community at large,’’ showing it’s open to women making progress on the political ladder, said Yossi Gestetner, a longtime Hasidic political activist and public relations consultant who comanaged Freier’s campaign.
Hasids and other ultra- Orthodox groups together make up only 6 percent of America’s estimated 5.3 million adult Jews, according to a 2013 Pew Research Center study.
Followers often speak Yiddish, wear traditional dress including beards and sidelocks for men and wigs for married women, and separate men and women in contexts ranging from buses to classrooms.
‘‘The very idea that an ultra-Orthodox woman could be a judge’’ is notable, said Samuel Heilman, a City University of New York sociology professor who studies Orthodox Judaism.
Under the strictest interpretations of Jewish law, women can’t be judges or largely even witnesses in the rabbinical courts that weigh disputes in Orthodox communities.
Freier, 51, started working as a legal secretary after high school. After graduating from private Touro College, she went on to Brooklyn Law School, finishing in 2005.
