Source Jew in the City
When picturing an Orthodox Jewish woman, most people conjure up an image of a lady carrying a baby, not a gun. But for Ariella Loew, it seemed like there was no reason she couldn’t do both! Loew grew up in Lincolnwood, just outside of Chicago in an Orthodox family and though she had never seen a frum female cop before, there was a female role model who impacted her from a young age. “My mom was already doing something that most frum women don’t do – she was a radio newscaster. When she walked in for her interview she told them she couldn’t work on Shabbos, and they said ‘okay its not a problem.’ Then she said ‘I also need all these other days off’ and she made a career as a news reporter for over forty years. She showed me that Orthodox people can do things that other people think they can’t.”
“It is a long process to apply. You have to take a test, a fitness test…a polygraph, a psych evaluation… an interview… a conditional offer. In Chicago you can’t go to a police academy unless you are sponsored by a department. I went to the Chicago Police Academy…which is about sixteen weeks long.”
In terms of the halachos involved, Loew has done her homework. “I had a ton of people say to me ‘good luck getting Shabbos off, you’re never going to be able to get that’ and I actually spoke to a rabbi before I seriously started applying to jobs, just to find out what I could and couldn’t do. I know that some rabbis say being a doctor is pikuach nefesh (saving a life) and you can work on Shabbos. Rabbi Gedalia Dov Schwartz was the person I spoke with who said it was okay. There are things I couldn’t do and things that I could do in the application process.”
Shabbos remains the main challenge within observance as an officer, but there remain vast differences between Loew and her colleagues. “My ideals and background are completely different from them…the way we speak…we still have the same end goals in mind, but how we [get there] is quite different.” For other would-be Orthodox trailblazers out there Loew advises people to take it slowly and work out the kinks, “You have to have the determination to do it.” When you encounter negativity, she says “Use [it] to prove them wrong. Use it as more of a challenge then anything else.”
