In 2009, when a group of Amish people visited Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the confusion was palpable.

“Are you from Uzbekistan?” a Jewish man asked the visitors, according to NBC News.

An Amish man — equally befuddled by geography — responded: "Afghanistan?"

The group was from neither Uzbekistan nor Afghanistan, nor Tajikistan, nor Kazakhstan. They were from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and while this may have once caused confusion, Haredi New Yorkers have since grown more familiar with their Amish compatriots.

According to a new study of Haredi tourism to Amish Country, written by scholars Rachel Feldman and Ayala Fader and published this month in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the visits began in the late 1990s and have grown at an especially fast rate in the last decade.

Feldman and Fader visited Lancaster together three times to interview people and observe interactions between the two insular religious groups. They traveled in the summer as well as on Chol HaMoed Passover and Sukkot since the intermediate days of the latter two festivals are especially popular times for Haredim to visit. These types of visits have increased to the point where some Haredi girls’ schools go on graduation trips to Lancaster to visit Amish families, and Hasidic women from New York regularly visit Lancaster to bring back milk that was produced in collaboration between Christian and Orthodox Jewish dairy farmers.

Tour operators court Haredi visitors by advertising in Orthodox media around Jewish holidays –  offering Haredi-friendly accommodations in hotels, like kitchens and gender-separate hours at the pool. Besides, visiting the modestly dressed Amish is viewed as less threatening to the Haredi sensibility than a vacation in Miami Beach — or anywhere else where a person might brandish an elbow, knee, or worse.

Amish-Haredi relations might be framed as a “match made in heaven” because of obvious similarities between the two stringent religious groups, including similar languages and similar political views. But Feldman and Fader say that many Haredi families who visit Lancaster don’t actually like to see themselves as being similar to Amish people.

Haredim visit Lancaster partly to bask in nostalgia for life in 19th-century Europe. But they also sought to prove during their visits that “they were more moderate and rational than the Amish” and “to articulate, especially for their children, how Jewish Orthodoxy was unique, special, and true.”

For example, “a Hasidic mother told us her son thought the Amish rejection of electricity was ‘weird,’” the researchers wrote. “He wondered why the Amish did not ‘just do a middle ground like Hasidic Jews do.’” (The Amish don’t drive cars and avoid using electricity; by contrast, Haredim do use cars and electricity, except on Shabbat and some holidays. Using social media and watching TV are forbidden for many Haredim.) 

The researchers interviewed a tour guide who said that Haredi girls “said they ‘felt sorry’ for the Amish girls, whose lives seemed so much harder without phones or electricity.” They also talked to a Hasidic woman who remembered being told as a child by her teacher that unlike Haredi men, “Amish men don’t help much” with chores around the house.

Dainy Bernstein, a scholar from Borough Park who studies Haredi children’s literature and analyzes how Haredi communities think of themselves, said these Haredi tourists’ comments are not surprising. According to Bernstein, Haredim calling Amish habits “weird” and saying they feel “sorry” for them is an attempt to serve both of these goals: countering the image of Haredim as being stuck in the past and expressing pride in their particular level of religious observance.

“Haredim and Hasidim are so often called backwards and stuck in the past. They invest a lot of energy into proving that idea wrong,” Bernstein said.

Haredim may also take pride in staying religious despite being exposed to things that are forbidden to the Amish. As Bernstein put it, they may feel that "it's easy to be holy when you're fully separated from the world, but it's even holier to grapple with the temptations of modernity, overcome them, and remain committed to Torah life.”