When an Orthodox husband and wife and their two children approached the entrance to B’nai Reuven, a Chabad-Lubovitch shul in Chicago’s West Rogers Park, last Shabbat, their greeter was an armed security guard. “What has been happening here we’ve seen before,” said the husband, Avram, who refused to give his last name, citing concerns for…
It was a decidedly perplexing social studies assignment, even before Gladys Shelby’s teacher told her she didn’t have to draw swastikas to get a good grade. As part of a unit on the Holocaust, Gladys, an eighth grader at Eliza Chappell Elementary, a public school in Chicago, had to design her own Nazi propaganda poster….
When a refugee family arrived from Afghanistan to their first apartment in Chicago, a case worker from a local Jewish social services agency was there to welcome them. His name? Abdul. The family was overwhelmed to see their new home fully furnished. As the older boys helped with suitcases, the young daughter ran from room…
When Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer arrived in Chicago from Cincinnati in the early 1970s, he found deaf Jews attending church services because they had no synagogue to accommodate their needs or view them as equals. So in 1973, Goldhamer founded Congregation Bene Shalom, a Reform synagogue in Skokie, Illinois, that interprets all of its services in…
Amid many gloomy predictions that American Jewry is shrinking, disengaging and assimilating, comes bracing news from Chicago: um, maybe not. A just-released Chicago Jewish population study — the largest one ever — found that the community is instead growing and diversifying: • The study shows that the Jewish population in Chicago is nearly 320,000, an…
A Chicago Jewish mother struggled in her relationship with her child’s father, but it wasn’t until she turned for help to a local Jewish agency that the reason became clear: she was a victim of domestic abuse. “For the first time, I felt heard and understood” said M., whose identity has been obscured for her…
“Matthew died last night. I’m shocked and sorry to tell you-it’s suicide. Hannah is a wreck.” I kept rereading the text as though the words would make sense if I inspected them more closely. I grew up with Hannah (For reasons of privacy, I’m not using the family’s real names here.) She and Matthew had…
Appropriately appearing just before the harvest festival of Sukkot, this column marks the beginning of a series on farming and food from Remi and Gavi Welbel, who run Zumwalt Acres, a sustainable Jewish farm in Illinois. Growing up, my sister and I often joked that our father thought asparagus could save the world. Driving along…
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