Since 1982, Stephen Durchslag has collected thousands of haggadot from around the world, acquiring what is believed to be the largest private one in the world. Now, the former Chicago attorney has bequeathed it to the University of Chicago to enhance and grow its exposure for generations to come. The collection features over 4,500 Passover…
Sometimes a sign is more than a sign. In 2019, the City of Chicago informed Robert’s Fish Market, the only kosher fish market in Chicago, that the permit for its iconic sign had expired. The city fined the shop’s owner, Arturo Venegas, and Venegas took it down. That made a tough business even tougher. But…
A public monument featuring Revolutionary War financier Haym Saloman, a Polish-Jewish American businessman, may be removed from where it stands in Chicago’s Heald Square. The monument, along with 40 others, is under review by the Chicago Monument Project as part of the city’s effort to “address the hard truths of Chicago’s racial history.” The project…
Students at University of Illinois at Chicago are calling for the university’s School of Public Health (SPH) to cut all ties with Israeli academic institutions. A petition drafted and circulated online by UIC’s Students for Justice for Palestine (SJP) has gathered over 200 signatures in under 48 hours. The petition protests an upcoming virtual lecture…
When he was just 30 days old, Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer suffered a botched radiation treatment for a skin ailment, leaving half his body discolored. Growing up he was often teased and treated differently. Eventually, Goldhamer found his career calling in the seminary, attending Hebrew Union College in 1967.His experience as an outsider led him to…
Block Club Chicago is a nonprofit newsroom focused on Chicago’s neighborhoods. Subscribe to support their on-the-ground reporting here. Neighbors are pushing for a Northwest Side park to be renamed after an influential German-Jewish author and poet who died in the Holocaust. Kolmar Park, 4143 N. Kolmar Ave., is named for the street on which it…
Myra Friedman clicked on the video, and there it was: the old neighborhood, the high school clubs, the gray jackets with pink lettering, the shopping trips to Woolworth’s and Kresge’s, the multiple synagogues. The 1950s and ‘60s in Jewish Chicago were back, in a documentary playing on her computer in L.A., and on laptops, tablets,…
The moment that crystallized Howard Reich’s future in music, writing and Judaism occurred when, as a 16-year-old living in the largely Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill., he found the 1951 Best-Picture winning musical “An American in Paris” showing on the family TV. George Gershwin, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, wrote the film’s music,…
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