The Hon. Judge Rachel “Ruchie” Freier made history this week as the first Chassidic woman ever to be elected to take the bench in New York Civil Court. The founder of Brooklyn’s Ezras Nashim all-female ambulance service, Chasdei Devorah and the B’Derech program for at-risk teens turned in a stunning electoral victory in Brooklyn’s Borough Park and Flatbush neighborhoods.

Judge Freier-elect is replacing Judge Noach Dear in the 5th Judicial District Civil Court, State of New York. Dear was recently promoted to State Supreme Court, the main trial court of New York.

As an attorney, she is licensed to practice law in New York, New Jersey and the District of Columbia, with more than 30 years’ experience in the field of law. Freier specializes in commercial and residential real estate law, and until her election as a judge maintained offices in Brooklyn and Monroe, NY. She also shares space with her husband and children in a family-run real estate business.

Freier has served as a community board member in Borough Park in addition to founding numerous nonprofit organizations, and after also becoming a licensed EMT in 2012; she eventually earned a New York State license as a paramedic as well. As a lawyer, she has served as a volunteer attorney at the NYC Family Court and is a member of various Bar organizations.

The new judge ran a widely popular campaign, appealing to people across the spectrum with her history of working hard “from the ground floor up” to reach her goals, and persevering without cease until she has achieved the objectives she has set for herself.

A wife and mother of six, Freier attended Touro College to earn her B.A. at age 30, after having given birth to her first three children. That took six years, during which she gave birth to another child, and twins. Working as a legal secretary, she then started law school, and began observing court cases “in vivo” during the summer months.

In a 2015 interview with The Jewish Press, Shreier cited the strong support of her husband and her mother as major factors in her success, and noted that her “family always came first.”

Brooklynites in the 5th District clearly were able to relate to those priorities, as well as to her strong desires to help others get what they need, even when it meant putting in time and hard work of her own to do it.

The Jewish Press enthusiastically endorses Rachel (Ruchie) Freier for civil court judge in Brooklyn’s fifth judicial district, which includes Boro Park, Kensington, Midwood, Ocean Parkway, and 21 other Brooklyn neighborhoods. If elected, Ms. Freier would be the first chassidic woman judge in New York and in the United States. She seeks to fill the civil court seat vacated by Noach Dear, who recently was elected to the New York State Supreme Court.

Ms. Freier practices law from her Brooklyn and Monroe offices. She’s licensed in New York, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia and has practiced in both the private and pro bono sectors. She has a broad range of experience in contracts and closings, transactional law, litigation, corporate law, trust and estates law, family law, and personal injury law.

Ms. Freier founded B’Derech – a GED program for chassidic young men to help them get back on the “derech.” She is also the director of Ezras Nashim, the first all-female volunteer EMT corps, which responds to emergency calls from women.

Ms. Freier holds an advanced EMT license and completed a full year of training in Northshore LIJ (now Northwell). Her medical training as a paramedic gave her a better understanding of statutes and case law related to personal injury, trauma, and vehicular accident matters. In the course of her career Ms. Freier has gained a broad perspective on public advocacy, emergency medicine, and public health law.

Ms. Freier’s activism stems from her admiration for Sarah Schenirer, the pioneer of the Bais Yaakov movement. Her election to the civil court would be an inspiration to all frum girls, from chassidic as well as non-chassidic backgrounds.

The election will be held on Tuesday, September 13. We urge all our readers in the fifth judicial district to go out and vote and put an extremely talented young mother – who will make us proud – on the civil court bench in Brooklyn.

Judge Claudio Bonadio wants to restart the investigation of former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner over a cover-up that followed the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, media outlets reported Tuesday. In January 2015, special prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who was Jewish, was found dead with a bullet in his head in his apartment on the day he was scheduled to present his charges against Fernandez to a Congressional committee.

Magistrate Daniel Rafecas, who a few days earlier had refused to reopen the case against Fernandez, which he closed in 2015, on Tuesday accepted a request for the investigation’s files from Judge Bonadio, but told Spanish news agency EFE that “the case has been closed for the lack of a crime, so that technically there is no case. What Dr. Bonadio could do is open a new investigation — but exclusively based on new evidence.”

Rafecas added that he is “obligated to send [the files] to him so that he has it on hand to evaluate or study all the findings of my inquiry.”

Nisman was appointed Special Prosecutor in charge of the AMIA bombing investigation on September 13, 2004. The probe into the 1994 terrorist attack against the AMIA had been marked by judicial misconduct, and was at an impasse. On October 25, 2006, Nisman formally accused the government of Iran of directing the AMIA bombing, and the Hezbollah militia of carrying it out. The theory was that Argentina had been targeted by Iran as punishment for its decision to suspend a nuclear technology sale to Tehran. In November 2007, Interpol published the names of six individuals officially accused for their role in the terrorist attack: Imad Fayez Moughnieh, Ali Fallahijan, Mohsen Rabbani, Ahmad Reza Asghari, Ahmad Vahidi and Mohsen Rezaee.

In 2008 Nisman asked to arrest former president Carlos Menem, along with Judge Juan José Galeano, who first presided over the AMIA case until his removal in 2004. WikiLeaks revealed that US diplomats considered that Nisman may have done it as a gesture to new President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, since he was seeking the post of Argentina’s General Prosecutor.

In January 2015, Nisman accused President Kirchner, Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman and other politicians of covering up the roles of Iranian suspects in the case, in exchange for Iranian business. The charge was based on wire tap reports of meetings of Kirchner’s people with Mohsen Rabbani, a former cultural attaché at Iran’s embassy in Buenos Aires.

Nisman’s body was discovered on the day he was supposed to appear before a parliamentary committee to present his case against the president (who has since lost her post).

The bizarre saga of the minor from Yitzhar continues, this time with the police harassing the young boy’s elderly grandparents in Petach Tikva as well as others who helped the boy comply with the IDF’s administrative expulsion order, according to the Honenu legal aid society.

For reasons unknown, the IDF gave an administrative distancing order to a 15-year-old minor from Yitzhar, requiring that he leave his parents’ home and all of Judea and Samaria. They claim he is a danger to the state, but there’s been no trial, no evidence, and they only arrested the boy for not leaving his parents’ home as ordered and not for any criminal actions they imagine he’s done.

The family has been trying to fight the secretive order. The other week the police arrested the boy at 3 AM in his parents’ home and tried to send him to some unknown farm in the south of the country, apparently for reeducation.

The family fought it.

In part because the police couldn’t even provide basic details on the facility and they didn’t follow procedures and bring in child welfare services, the court decided to free the boy to return home. The court strongly criticized the police for their actions.

But the police immediately appealed to a different judge who threw the boy back in jail over Shabbat.

After Shabbat the first court released the boy again, but he could not return to Judea and Samaria, so he has been going to different homes each night to sleep, to comply with the anti-democratic distancing order.

The Petach Tikva Magistrate’s court is expected to make an interim decision on Tuesday, and until then, the expelled youth has been living part of the time with his grandparents, despite their protests to the court that it would be too difficult for them to take him in because of the police expectations from them.

And the police are making sure that it is very difficult on the grandparents.

The police decided to visit and harass the grandparents in the middle of the night, despite promising the court it wouldn’t do that.

This week the police began loudly banging on the grandparents’ door at 4 AM, screaming at the couple, demanding the elderly couple immediately open up the door so they could check if the minor was sleeping there.

When the elderly couple asked the police how they can show up at that hour and act that way, one policeman answered they can show up whenever they want.

Nor is this a one-time occurrence by the police.

At a different home the boy had stayed at previously in Givatayim, the police showed up at 11 PM with their walkie-talkies on at full volume. They began ringing the intercom of different neighbors, despite the family’s name being clearly posted on the intercom, and worse, despite knowing the boy wasn’t even there anymore, as he had informed the police he was sleeping at a different address that night.

The host family said the police woke up the entire street with their actions.

The boy’s former host asked, “Why are the police punishing them?” They were helping the family comply with the judge’s order.

Unfortunately, similar stories of police abuse are not unknown in Israel.

The family continues to protest, and other youths have begun protesting in front of the home of Central Command chief Ron Numa who signed the bizarre IDF expulsion order of the young boy from his home.

Is Hollywood having a negative effect on our everyday lives? You be the judge.

The Tel Aviv District Attorney’s Office on Sunday indicted Barak Nagar, 31, a volleyball judge, who attempted to murder his friend over getting picked to judge an international tournament in his place. According to the indictment, Nagar invited his friend, whom he has known from their work for the Israeli Volleyball Association, to his Tel Aviv apartment after the friend had won the job of judging an international European competition which Barak had lost. Nagar decided to hang his friend to death from a seesaw hook in his living room ceiling. After the hanging, Nagar planned to cut up his friend’s body and dispose of the parts.

According to the indictment, the defendant acquired a rope, sleeping pills, garbage bags, a saw, two Japanese knives and a tape. He also killed a dog and a cat from the neighborhood and practiced his plan on their bodies.

Once he felt ready for the mission, Nagar invited his friend over to his apartment, and when he arrived he talked him into drinking liquor, saying he had a house rule of having to do a shot every 15 minutes. He mixed some 29 Klonopin and one Nocturno sleeping pills with his friend’s drinks to get him drowsy. Finally, the friend became sleepy and lied down on a bed. Nagar spread garbage bags on the apartment floor, for his friend’s body. He then stripped his friend naked. His friend woke up now and then and observed what was being done to him, but was unable to resist.

When Nagar realized his friend was not fully sedated, he decided to kill him by cutting his throat rather than by hanging him. He tied his friend’s legs together with the rope, took one of the Japanese knives and sat down on his friend’s stomach. When the friend asked what he was doing, Nagar threw the knife beyond the bed and said he wanted to kiss his friend, but his friend refused. The friend then fell asleep again and Nagar stabbed him several times in the left side of his neck with the knife and strangled him with both hands.

The strangling woke his friend from his slumber and he started fighting back. He asked Nagar to stop, but Nagar continued to strangle him, fought him, smacked his head against the floor and smacked him in the face with his fists. Eventually the friend managed to hit Nagar in the head and escaped from the apartment, naked and hemorrhaging from his neck. Pedestrians downstairs alerted the rescue teams.

Nagar is also accused of interfering with the investigation, when he wiped off his victim’s blood from the floor with a mop and washed his hands. He also hid evidence, by taking his friend’s wallet, cellphone and car keys — and left the apartment. Nagar then dumped the phone and the keys in the sea and threw the wallet in a sewer.

Was this a case of too many Hollywood movies? Probably — and not the smooth ones, but the hectic, Coen Brothers kind, where much blood is spilled over much ineptness and shoddy planning.

On Friday, the Petach Tikva magistrate court (Beit Mishpat Hashalom) ordered the 15-year-old boy from Yitzhar, who was arrested by police at 3 AM that morning, returned to his home.

The judge, Yael Blecher, strongly reprimanded the police for not bothering to even check with the appropriate child welfare services or even knowing what conditions the boy would have in the re-education farm he was being sent to.

The police, unwilling to accept the court’s decision turned to the District Court on Friday afternoon. That judge overturned the ruling, and had the minor sent to jail until Sunday.

Federal Judge John J. McConnell Jr. ruled in favor of Jeshuat Israel which resides in Touro Synagogue in Newport, RI, and against Shearith Israel of New York which had claimed ownership of the edifice and its contents, the NY Times reported Monday.

The $7.4 million dispute between two of America’s oldest Jewish congregations erupted in 2011, when the Newport Touro synagogue congregation, known as Jeshuat Israel (Heb: salvation of Israel), offered to sell the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston two silver Torah ornaments called “rimonim” (Heb: pomegranates) for $7.4 million. But the ornaments, like the rest of the synagogue, were the property of Congregation Shearith Israel, currently residing on West 70th Street in New York, and they were not amused when they heard of the sale.

Shearith Israel trustee Michael Katz testified that “we were aghast that they were doing this without informing us in advance. We considered it a violation of the lease. We considered it a violation of trust, and it upset us very, very much.”

Back in the early 1900s, the NY congregation leased the Touro building to a newcomer Jewish congregation in Newport for $1 a year (which, in today’s value, comes to $1.87). They didn’t believe this generous lease empowered the tenants to sell off parts of the synagogue.

Bea Ross, of the Newport congregation, testified that she had informed Katz of the sale, but not directly. In 2009, there was a Forward article about the sale of the rimonim, and she and Katz talked about it over the phone. Apparently, that call didn’t leave as much of an impression on Katz.

The $7.4 million rimonim / Newmans, Ltd. report

Members of the Newport congregation told the court that the reason they had to sell the ornaments—which were made by Jewish American Silversmith Myer Myers (1723-1795)—was that their numbers were starting to dwindle and they could no longer afford to pay a rabbi.

Rabbi Marc Mandel, formerly the associate rabbi of Beth Jacob Congregation in Beverly Hills, Ca. has been the Jeshuat Israel spiritual leader since 2011.

Incidentally, the reason the NY congregation has owned the Newport synagogue in the first place had to do with the declining numbers of Newport’s Jews in the late 18th century, when Shearith Israel took over the building and remained its caretaker as it stood empty for almost a hundred years.

Katz told the court that his congregation saw itself as strictly the landlord of the Newport synagogue, and not responsible for its financial problems (they had come asking for help).

On the face of it, the case looked like it should have gone to the New York congregation, but the local paper, Times Argus, reported prior to the trial that the state of Rhode Island was monitoring the case and planned to intervene with the judge to make sure “justice would be done.” Now the ruling has cleared the way for Jeshuat Israel to sell the rimonim, valued at $7.4 million—there are 130 members left in the congregation, so “justice” in this case could net them $57,000 each, before court costs. Or it could pay the rabbi’s salary and maintenance.

“The central issue here is the legacy of some of the earliest Jewish settlers in North America, who desired to make Newport a permanent haven for public Jewish worship,” Judge McConnell wrote in a 106-page decision, disregarding the fact that said legacy had been interrupted for as long as a century, and that what he facilitated was the removing of $7.4 million from the possession of a New York congregation, its legal owner, and handing it over to a local group that couldn’t pay its own way.