Visiting the Amish
“Holmes County and our surrounding counties are home to the largest community of Amish in the world,” says Bonnie Coblentz, marketing coordinator for the Holmes County Tourism Bureau. About two-and-a-half hours northeast of Dayton, it’s one of the top tourist destinations in Ohio.
How to watch
What: “Amish Grace”
When: 8 p.m. Sunday, March 28
Where: Lifetime Movie Network
For info: www.lmn.tv
According to Coblentz, whose family is Amish, there are currently about 40,000 Amish residents in those communities, with the population doubling every 16 years. You can taste Amish food at a number of local restaurants, visit Amish artisans in their homes, purchase everything from candles to handwoven baskets and hand-worked leather. There’s pottery, quilting, furniture. You can even have a dinner in an Amish home.
Coblentz says the best place to begin your visit is the Amish and Mennonite Heritage Center in Berlin, where you can take a guided tour of the circular mural (Bahalt) that tells the story of Amish heritage.
UD associate professor Susan Trollinger recommends the guided tour of Yoder’s Amish Home that includes barns, buggy rides, the schoolhouse and an Amish kitchen, the towns of Berlin and Walnut Creek for shopping and for dining, Boyd and Wurthman’s in Berlin and Mrs. Yoder’s Kitchen in Mount Hope.
Other popular attractions: the Mount Hope Auction including livestock, Lehman’s Hardware in Mount Hope and Kidron, Keim Lumber in Charm, Helping Hands Quilt Shop and the Quilt Museum in Berlin.
The other large community of Amish in Ohio is in Geauga County, east of Cleveland.
For information on Holmes County, go online to www. visitamishcountry.com.
If someone murdered your child, could you ever forgive him?
That’s the difficult question raised by the made-for-television film “Amish Grace,” which premieres on the Lifetime Movie Network at 8 p.m. Sunday, March 28.
The film is based on a true story of the Amish community’s faith and forgiveness following the 2006 tragic schoolhouse shooting of five girls at the West Nichels Mines Amish School in Pennsylvania. When the Amish forgave the gunman, attended his funeral, offered support to his widow and even supported a fund for the shooter’s family, the outside world reacted with disbelief.
The story was documented in a book, “Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy” by Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt and David L. Weaver-Zercher. The TV film is based on the book but is partially fictionalized.
Susan Trollinger, a national expert on the Amish and a University of Dayton associate professor of English, is using the book in her undergraduate writing class and will be previewing the film for her students, as well. As director of writing programs, she says that part of UD’s new approach to composition involves themed-based writing courses. Last year, and again this year, she chose the Amish as her subject.
Formerly married to a man who grew up in a Mennonite community, Trollinger spent a summer living with his family in Holmes County, Ohio, home to the largest Amish settlement in the world. She’s written a book about Amish tourism and the fascination Americans have with the Amish.
“There is a great deal to learn from the Amish,” Trollinger says. “They are very good at nurturing and sustaining their communities. We can learn from them about mutual aid. In these days of our health-care crisis, it’s interesting to note that the Amish never worry about going bankrupt because of a hospital bill, they know their community will help them pay their bills when necessary.”
Although the news stories in 2006 initially focused on the shooting in Pennsylvania, she says, they quickly shifted to the Amish response of forgiveness.
“It confounded most Americans and the press,” Trollinger says. “It flies in the face of the deeply American idea of redemptive violence.” A violent act, she says, throws everything out of whack and upsets our equilibrium.
“The only way to get in balance again is to commit another violent act and even the score,” she explains, adding that the Hollywood response is to blow the bad guy away. “And that’s also the idea behind capital punishment.”
Trollinger believes that most Americans believe it is their job to get justice if someone enters their home and hurts a member of their family.
“The Amish community believes that their task is not to get justice but to offer forgiveness,” she says. “It’s a question of faith.”
She describes the Amish as “very Biblical” and says “The Lord’s Prayer” explains the basis for their actions — “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who tresspass against us.”
“They also recognize that Charles Robert, the killer, was a sinner and that they, too, have sinned,” she says. “It’s not their job to judge.”
In addition to writing on the subject, the 21 students in Trollinger’s class will take a field trip to Holmes County in April.
“We’ll tour important educational sites, watch the Amish auction their livestock, learn about how they are thriving economically now that most of them no longer farm, and share a meal with an Amish family,” Trollinger says.
She’s had a chance to preview the Lifetime movie and thinks it’s pretty well done despite the fact that inaccuracies exist.
“It’s less about learning about the Amish and more about telling a compelling story of forgiveness,” she says, adding that an Amish preacher would speak in German or Pennsylvania Dutch rather than English, and the hymns would not be sung in English. Trollinger says the primary inaccuracy comes in the form of a lead character — a mother of one of the girls who is killed who gets angry and considers leaving the community.
“That didn’t happen,” says Trollinger. “The Amish retention rate is 93 percent. Typically, if they are going to leave, they would leave at adolescence.”
Still, she understands why filmmakers created that particular character.
“If you only present the way the Amish forgive, it would be so bizarre that no one would relate to it,” she concludes. “By creating the character of Ida and allowing her grief and anger, it gives the rest of us a way in, a way to identify. The film challenges us to think about this question for ourselves.’’
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2440 or mmoss@DaytonDaily News.com.
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