Orthodox Jewish scholar builds lasting ties with Pennsylvania Amish

2024 book relays findings and experience from first comparative study

Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar arrived in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 2011 to study Amish communities even though she had visited the U.S. only once and could barely speak English. More than a decade later, the Jerusalem-based Orthodox Jewish scholar had made more than 100 research visits for short and extended stays in Lancaster and beyond, and returned in September to research a second book on Amish women. Some of the women she has lived with now count as extended family, she said.

Neriya-Ben Shahar said she had spent years researching women in Israel’s Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, community when one of her academic advisers, Yehiel Limor, “basically forced me to read about the Amish.” She recalled relenting despite having little time and finding that the material was in English. “I just fell in love with this community,” she said. Her research now spans media, sociology and anthropology. She conducted the first comparative study of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel and old-order Amish communities with her 2024 book, “Strictly Observant,” relaying both her findings and her experience in it.

A tenured senior lecturer at Sapir Academic College in Sderot in southern Israel, Neriya-Ben Shahar said early work was difficult because of language barriers, limited knowledge of the United States and difficulty securing funding. A Fulbright Grant allowed her to study rituals Jewish women create for themselves, while she investigated Amish communities when time allowed. She took a position at Brandeis University, and her husband took one at Harvard University; the couple moved to Massachusetts for the 2011-2012 academic year.

They then began driving to Lancaster County, which has the largest Amish population in the world, after friends warned them that the community was extremely insular. On their first visit, they followed a buggy until a young Amish woman emerged from a farmhouse. Neriya-Ben Shahar recalled jumping from the car and approaching the woman, whom she identified as “Suzi.” All research subjects were given pseudonyms in accordance with research standards.

She said: “Hi, my name is Rebecca (Rivka, in Hebrew), like Rebecca from the Bible. I came from Jerusalem, from the Holy Land, can I speak with you?” Neriya-Ben Shahar’s own modest hair covering and long dress led Suzi to invite her into her home.

When Neriya-Ben Shahar met Suzi’s mother, “Anna,” the two felt an instant connection and agreed to meet again, she said. They exchanged letters, and Neriya-Ben Shahar began joining the family’s daily work during scheduled visits. On one early visit, the family’s six children had left for the day, leaving breakfast and lunchbox dishes in the kitchen; Neriya-Ben Shahar washed them before tackling laundry, starting a regular practice of helping the family with daily chores while she stayed with them.

She eventually spent “many months” with Amish families, including three weeks living on Anna’s farm, and said Anna’s family became her “home base” in the United States. The family keeps boxes of Neriya-Ben Shahar’s kosher dishes and clothes in its attic, marked “Rebecca from the Holy Land, don’t touch,” she said.

The hosts gave her the highest shelf in a small propane-powered refrigerator so unkosher food could not fall onto her kosher items. She cooks with her own pots and pans but eats with the family, whose members bring her a lit flashlight on Shabbat so she can find her way in the dark. Although traditional Amish do not drive, they let Neriya-Ben Shahar take them on errands.

One Sunday, Anna took a nap because she knew the strawberries and peas in the fields would spoil, given that the Amish do not do manual labor on the Christian sabbath, and Neriya-Ben Shahar harvested them. “We just care about each other and try to help whenever we can,” Neriya-Ben Shahar said. She said Anna trusted her not to expose the family to the internet or smartphones, which the Amish community bans.

The report described the Amish as a Protestant denomination dating to 16th-century Europe. It said they now live in 32 states, mostly in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, according to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College.

The Amish do not drive cars or use electricity, televisions or computers, and their homes do not have phones, though some shops and businesses have landlines. By contrast, Haredi Jews in Israel increasingly use smartphones and computers with filters that keep the content the users consider kosher and block everything else. They drive cars and use electricity but do not turn it on and off on Shabbat, and most rely on their own media outlets for news.

Both communities strictly observe their religions and eschew certain elements of modern life despite those differences. Neriya-Ben Shahar’s first book found that Haredi and Amish women, both mothers of large families, view themselves as transmitters of community values in societies they see as under threat from modernity and technology. Both place enormous importance on modesty, but “The ultra-Orthodox try to separate everything by gender, and the Amish try to live together and stay very modest at the same time,” she explained.

The research also found sharp differences in courtship, health care, education and work. Many Haredi parents hire matchmakers to marry off their children, while “the Amish fall in love in their youth groups,” Neriya-Ben Shahar said. “It was something hard for me to believe.”

In Neriya-Ben Shahar’s account, Haredi Israelis liberally use Israel’s universal health care system, while the Amish use the American medical system as a last resort. She says ultra-Orthodox girls generally receive 12 years of formal education followed by seminary or professional training, while traditional Amish schooling for both boys and girls ends after eighth grade. She also says most Haredi women work outside the home, while most married Amish women become homemakers.

Neriya-Ben Shahar said: “Both call the internet and smartphones Satan’s tool, something that will destroy our community.” Her next book will focus solely on aspects of Amish women’s lives, such as child-rearing, marriage, prayer, mutual aid and housework, she said, while she also conducts new studies of haredim and health and welfare services in Israel.

Nimrod Bar-Am, dean of research at Sapir College, credited Neriya-Ben Shahar with deepening “our anthropological understanding of the dynamics and challenges of closed, zealous communities that manage to sustain themselves at the very heart of open liberal societies.” He said she does so through what he described as a “uniquely brilliant use of her own theoretical, biographical and personal background” as someone who herself grew up within a religious society, and is thereby able to generate “compelling universal insights” into how such communities contend with their existential challenges.

Neriya-Ben Shahar said the 14 years she has known the Amish “have changed my life in so many ways,” including teaching her to appreciate simple things she had long taken for granted. She drove Anna and Anna’s daughter to see the ocean for the first time; they had seen it only in photographs and were thrilled by the moving waves. When Neriya-Ben Shahar brought Anna water from the Jordan River, Anna cried, “Oh, Jesus walked on this water!” Neriya-Ben Shahar called it “one of the most religious moments in my life, just to see how excited she was.”

She often thinks about the choices Amish families make in the modern world. “They know everything they could buy and have,” she said. “They know that there is electricity and internet and smartphones and that they could drive, but they choose not to. When you talk with them, they look at you, they listen to you, they wait before they respond.”

Neriya-Ben Shahar said she misses the families when she has not seen them for a while, and that every morning when she prays she remembers the people who began as research subjects and became dear friends. “Every day when I pray the morning prayers, I pray for them and thank God for the fact that they are in my life,” she said.

In a letter for Neriya-Ben Shahar’s 50th birthday, shared with Anna’s consent, the Amish woman wrote: “Words fail to express our appreciation and love we have for you. There are so many things that you have enriched our lives with. Number one is to thank you for the many, many prayers that you have prayed on our behalf. Only God knows how many. Your prayers have made a difference.”