Review: ‘93Queen’ Follows Female Jewish EMS Workers in Brooklyn

For decades, enclaves of ultra-Orthodox Jews across New York City have received emergency medical care from a Jewish ambulance service called Hatzolah. But those EMS workers are all men. And while life-threatening situations allow for some leeway in strict prohibitions on contact between the sexes, some women remained reluctant to call for help.

As Hadassah Ellis, an EMS recruit in the documentary “93Queen,” puts it: These women have never held hands with anybody who are not their husbands — “and then suddenly there’s 10 men in her room while she’s exposed from the waist down?”

“93Queen,” the feature debut of Paula Eiselt, follows the creation of Ezras Nashim, an all-female EMS corps for the Borough Park area, in Brooklyn, that started in 2014. The organization was controversial among some ultra-Orthodox Jews, who saw it as an erosion of traditional gender roles and a Trojan horse that invited secularism into their neighborhoods. (The difficulty of access for filming should be noted here: Eiselt identifies as Orthodox herself and, while serving as her own cinematographer, followed her subjects’ customs relating to modesty during shooting.)

The film’s central figure is one of the group’s founders, Rachel Freier, known as Ruchie (she is now a civil court judge). She eschews labels like “feminist,” which, she says, among some Hasidim connotes women who want to overstep religious boundaries separating women from men — boundaries that Ruchie continues to observe.

One of the biggest debates within Ezras Nashim as the corps gets underway is whether to allow single women to participate. Freier suggests that being married indicates that a woman is mature enough to handle being an EMT on call. At another moment, Ellis explains that accepting single women might give ammunition to Ezras Nashim’s detractors, because of a view she attributes to some rabbis that single women should not be exposed to situations the organization deals with.

The obstacles go beyond that. Online messages accuse Freier, among other things, of challenging the Torah and playing with fire. Rabbis refuse to publicly endorse the enterprise. And once inaugurated, the service meets with a rash of prank phone calls and, initially, few legitimate ones.

“93Queen” is not a groundbreaking documentary, but it does offer a more nuanced view of ultra-Orthodox Jews than is presented in films like “One of Us” from last year. Without denying that these women face discrimination in reaching their goal, the movie shows how its subjects are able to find ways to combine strict observance and progress. The contradictions are not always easy to square — the movie might benefit from certain basic details about how, say, Ezras Nashim and Hatzolah function during the unplugging that is part of observing Shabbat — but the movie’s upshot is heartening, even inspiring.

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Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.