In this Thursday, Dec. 29, 2016, photo, Rachel Freier looks up from her phone while posing for pictures at her law office in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, N.Y. In some ways, Freier has an ordinary background for a newly elected civil court judge: She’s a real estate and commercial lawyer who volunteers in family court and in her community, where she even serves as a paramedic. But then there’s all the extraordinary about Freier, who starts work in a Brooklyn courthouse Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2017, as apparently the first woman from Judaism’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community to be elected as a judge in the United States.