A group of women who have been seeking to join Brooklyn’s all-male Orthodox ambulance corps has now dropped its campaign, opting instead to establish a separate women’s service to tend to emergency births.
Calling themselves Ezras Nashim, a Hebrew phrase for the women’s section of the synagogue, the group petitioned for over a year to join the volunteer Hatzalah ambulance corps, a venerated Orthodox institution in Brooklyn and beyond. Hatzalah has balked at accepting them.
Now, Ezras Nashim will start its own corps with the goal of serving Orthodox women.
“Basically, we did the Hatzalah routine and it is going to get us nowhere,” said Yocheved Lerner-Miller, an emergency medical technician with Ezras Nashim. “They are adamant, and the goal now is to get going. That is how we are going to do it. We are going to do our own thing.”