Drive north out of Chicago along Sheridan Road, past the ravines and the lake on your right, and you reach a village of barely nine thousand people that has held a quiet place in American Jewish life for a century. The story of the Jews in Glencoe, Illinois, is not one of crowded immigrant streets. It is a story of arrival, of old German-Jewish families who had already made their fortunes downtown and came north looking for ravines, oak trees, and a lake view, and of the institutions they built once they got here.
The Place
Glencoe sits on the bluffs above Lake Michigan in the heart of Chicago’s North Shore, incorporated in 1869 and named, depending on which account you believe, for early resident Matthew Coe or for the Scottish glen whose seal the village borrowed. It is small, just under four square miles, and it is rich. The 2020 census recorded a median family income of $250,001, placing Glencoe among the twenty wealthiest communities in the United States.
The village has long been a showcase for ambitious architecture. It holds one of the largest collections of Frank Lloyd Wright work anywhere, including seven houses and a concrete bridge in the Ravine Bluffs subdivision he laid out around 1915. Homes by Howard Van Doren Shaw, David Adler, and George Washington Maher line the curving streets.
Children here attend Glencoe School District 35 and then New Trier High School, the storied public school in Winnetka and Northfield whose name has become shorthand for North Shore privilege. That combination, lakefront beauty and excellent schools, has shaped who chose to live in Glencoe for more than a hundred years.
How It Became Jewish
To understand the Jews of Glencoe you have to start downtown, in nineteenth-century Chicago, with a particular kind of Jewish family.
The German-Jewish establishment moves north
Chicago’s first significant Jewish community was made up largely of immigrants from German lands who arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. By the time their children and grandchildren came of age, many had built department stores, banks, garment firms, and mail-order houses. They were prosperous, acculturated, and Reform in their religious practice.
After the First World War, a group of these wealthy Jews, primarily the descendants of German immigrants, began moving out of the city and into the exclusive suburbs of the North Shore. Glencoe and neighbouring Highland Park drew them in particular. Where the Eastern European Jews who arrived later would cluster in Chicago’s West Side and Lawndale, the German-Jewish establishment looked north toward the ravines.
This was not, at first, an easy welcome. The North Shore in the early twentieth century practised the genteel antisemitism of restrictive covenants and exclusive clubs. Jewish families came anyway, and they came with the means to build their own institutions rather than wait to be admitted to anyone else’s.
A congregation finds its home
On June 1, 1920, about forty families gathered at the Hubbard Woods School in Winnetka for the first Shabbat service of what they called the North Shore Branch of Sinai Congregation, the venerable Reform temple back in Chicago. It was the seed of the oldest Reform congregation on the North Shore.
The branch grew quickly. Within a few years it counted 198 member families, and in 1924 it affiliated with the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the national Reform body. On April 19, 1926, the members voted to separate from Sinai and stand on their own. Three months later, having chosen a site in Glencoe, they settled on a name: North Shore Congregation Israel. Rabbi Harvey Wessel became its first full-time rabbi that same year.
That decision to plant the flagship Reform synagogue of the North Shore in Glencoe, rather than in larger Highland Park or Winnetka, helped fix the village as a centre of North Shore Jewish life for the rest of the century.
The building on the lake
For its permanent home the congregation acquired a nineteen-acre lakefront parcel on Sheridan Road, the former site of a 1911 mansion designed by the architect David Adler. In 1964 it dedicated a new sanctuary there, and the choice of architect was extraordinary.
Minoru Yamasaki, the Japanese-American modernist who would later design the original World Trade Center towers in New York, composed the Glencoe sanctuary as a series of soaring concrete fan vaults, with coloured and clear glass filling the spaces between the shells. He called it a confluence of daylight and solids. The congregation knew it as the Sanctuary of Light.
The building was a statement of confidence. It carried no applied Jewish iconography, only the drama of structure and light, an assertive piece of postwar modernism that announced a community fully at home in America. In 2018 it was named one of Illinois 200 Great Places.
A second congregation, and a fuller community
By the early 1970s Glencoe’s Jewish population was large enough to support a second Reform congregation. Am Shalom was founded by sixty families under Rabbi Harold L. Kudan, beginning life in a small storefront before settling into a renovated historic building at 840 Vernon Avenue. Kudan led the congregation for thirty years until his retirement in 2002, by which time it had grown to roughly 950 families.
Two thriving Reform congregations in a village of under nine thousand people tell you most of what you need to know. By the mid-1990s, observers estimated that close to half of Glencoe’s residents were Jewish, a remarkable concentration for a community that had once been kept out by covenant.
The Landmarks
North Shore Congregation Israel, 1185 Sheridan Road. The Yamasaki sanctuary of 1964 remains the oldest synagogue on the North Shore and the largest Reform congregation in the Chicago area. Its fan-vaulted Sanctuary of Light, rising from a lakefront lawn, is the single most recognisable building in Glencoe’s Jewish history.
Am Shalom, 840 Vernon Avenue. Glencoe’s second Reform congregation, founded in the early 1970s by Rabbi Harold Kudan, occupies a renovated historic building near the village centre. It grew from sixty founding families to nearly a thousand, proof that one synagogue was no longer enough for the village.
The Chicago Botanic Garden, 1000 Lake Cook Road. Sprawling across lagoons and islands at the northwest edge of Glencoe, the garden is one of the most visited in the country. Generations of North Shore families, Jewish and otherwise, have marked births, weddings, and quiet afternoons among its esplanades and willows.
Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court. Glencoe’s acclaimed professional theatre moved in 2016 into a glass-and-timber home designed by the architect Jeanne Gang, a cultural anchor in the village centre and a draw for the educated, arts-minded households that fill the surrounding streets.
New Trier High School. The public high school that serves Glencoe, with campuses in Winnetka and Northfield, has educated the village’s children for generations. Its reputation for academic excellence is woven into why so many Jewish families chose, and still choose, to raise children here.
Ravine Bluffs Subdivision. Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1915 development of houses, sculptural markers, and a concrete bridge gives Glencoe an architectural pedigree that drew design-conscious buyers, among them the assimilated, cultured families who shaped the village’s Jewish character.
St. Paul AME Church. A reminder that Glencoe’s story is older and more layered than any single group. Founded by Homer Wilson, the village’s first Black property owner, the church anchored an African American community present in Glencoe almost from its 1869 incorporation, a neighbour to the Jewish village that grew up around it.
Where They Came From
The founders of Jewish Glencoe did not arrive directly from Europe. They arrived from Chicago, and a generation or two earlier their families had arrived from the German-speaking lands of central Europe: Bavaria, the Rhineland, Württemberg, the German towns and villages from which so many of Chicago’s first Jews emigrated in the mid-nineteenth century.
That origin mattered. The German-Jewish families had time to prosper, to Americanise, and to embrace Reform Judaism before the great wave of Eastern European Jewish immigration arrived at the turn of the century. By the 1920s they were established Chicagoans with the wealth to follow the city’s elite out to the North Shore.
Later decades brought a broader mix. As covenants fell away and the Jewish middle class expanded after the Second World War, families of Eastern European descent joined the German-Jewish old guard in Glencoe and its neighbours. The founding of Am Shalom in the 1970s reflected a community large and varied enough to want more than one Reform home.
Glencoe Today
Glencoe in the 2020s is quieter than its mid-century self but no less Jewish in character. The 2020 census counted 8,849 residents on lots that often run to an acre, with home values commonly above a million dollars. The village remains overwhelmingly affluent and overwhelmingly oriented toward its schools, its lakefront, and its two synagogues.
North Shore Congregation Israel still gathers under Yamasaki’s vaults on Sheridan Road, and Am Shalom still fills its building on Vernon Avenue. Together they keep Glencoe one of the most concentrated centres of Reform Jewish life in the Midwest, even as younger families increasingly spread across the wider North Shore in places like Highland Park, Northbrook, Deerfield, and Buffalo Grove.
What endures in Glencoe is the particular flavour of its Jewish story: established, Reform, architecturally proud, and woven into one of America’s wealthiest small villages. The families who first came north looking for ravines and a lake view built something that outlasted them, and a century later the lights still burn in the Sanctuary of Light. For more on the region’s other Jewish enclaves, see our companion piece on the history of the Jews in Chicago.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Jews live in Glencoe, Illinois?
Glencoe has never published an official Jewish census, but by the mid-1990s observers estimated that close to half of the village’s residents were Jewish. With two large Reform congregations serving a village of fewer than nine thousand people, Jewish life remains central to Glencoe today.
Why did so many Jews settle in Glencoe?
The Jews in Glencoe were largely descendants of German immigrants who had prospered in nineteenth-century Chicago. After the First World War they moved north to the exclusive North Shore suburbs for the ravines, the lakefront, and the excellent schools, and they built their own institutions when older clubs and covenants excluded them.
What is North Shore Congregation Israel?
North Shore Congregation Israel, at 1185 Sheridan Road, is the oldest Reform synagogue on Chicago’s North Shore, founded in 1920. Its 1964 sanctuary, designed by Minoru Yamasaki with soaring concrete fan vaults, is one of the most celebrated pieces of modern synagogue architecture in America.
Who designed the synagogue in Glencoe?
The North Shore Congregation Israel sanctuary was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who later designed the original World Trade Center towers. Dedicated in 1964, his Sanctuary of Light uses arching concrete shells and coloured glass to create what he called a confluence of daylight and solids.
Is there more than one synagogue in Glencoe?
Yes. Alongside North Shore Congregation Israel, Glencoe is home to Am Shalom, a Reform congregation founded in the early 1970s by Rabbi Harold Kudan and now located at 840 Vernon Avenue. Two Reform congregations in one small village reflect how deeply rooted Jewish life is in Glencoe.
How is Glencoe different from Highland Park?
Both are North Shore suburbs with deep Jewish roots, but Glencoe is smaller, older, and historically associated with the German-Jewish establishment that first settled the North Shore. Highland Park, just to the north, is larger and drew a broader Jewish population over the twentieth century.
If your family’s story passed through Glencoe, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the German towns of central Europe to the ravines above Lake Michigan, to wherever you are now.