On a summer evening in Highland Park, the Metra train slows at a small stone depot and lets out a crowd carrying picnic baskets and folding chairs toward the lawns of Ravinia. Many of them are Jewish, and many have made this walk for three or four generations. The story of the Jews in Highland Park, Illinois is the story of how a Lake Michigan resort town an hour north of the city became the most Jewish suburb in metropolitan Chicago, and stayed that way.
The Place
Highland Park sits on the bluffs above Lake Michigan in Lake County, roughly twenty-five miles north of downtown Chicago, near the top of the string of affluent towns known as the North Shore. It is a place of ravines and old oaks, of lakefront beaches reached by wooden stairs and a walkable downtown along Central Avenue.
The town incorporated in 1869 and grew up around the railroad that connected it to the city. Wealth came early and stayed: substantial houses, leafy lots, and one of the highest median household incomes in Illinois.
Today about thirty thousand people live here. By the count that matters most to this story, roughly half of them are Jewish.
How It Became Jewish
The Jewish presence on the North Shore did not begin with houses. It began with summers.
The summer resort, 1900s to 1920s
Before 1900, the number of Jewish families in Highland Park could be counted on one hand. That changed when prosperous German Jewish families from Chicago, shut out of the Gentile country clubs and resorts that ringed the city, began buying land of their own up the lakefront.
In 1900 the extended Foreman family purchased a half block in Highland Park and built a private summer resort, with a shared kitchen and a central clubhouse where the families dined together. Others followed. By the 1920s there were two Jewish country clubs in the area, a synagogue, and, alongside the summer people, a small year-round Jewish community.
That early settlement gave Highland Park a head start no other suburb had. It was the first place around Chicago where a substantial Jewish population took root, and the foundation laid in those resort decades would carry the town through the century.
From the West Side to the North Shore
The great wave came after the Second World War. To understand it you have to look back at the city the newcomers left.
Chicago’s Jews had clustered first around Maxwell Street, then moved outward as they prospered. The largest number settled in North Lawndale on the West Side, which by the 1920s and 1930s held the biggest Jewish community in the city’s history. Others spread northwest into Humboldt Park, Logan Square, and especially Albany Park.
After 1945 those neighbourhoods emptied northward. Families that had grown up in Lawndale two-flats and Albany Park apartments bought cars, took mortgages, and moved to the suburbs in numbers that reshaped the region. In 1950 only about five percent of metropolitan Chicago’s Jews lived in the suburbs. By the 1990s the figure was roughly seventy percent.
Much of that migration ran straight up the lakefront and the rail lines to the North Shore. Skokie absorbed a huge share closer in, and the Jewish community in Skokie became famous in its own right. Further up the line, the older, wealthier ground of Highland Park drew families looking for the same suburban life with more lake, more land, and a Jewish foothold already a generation deep.
The pattern was a national one. In the same decades that Highland Park filled up, affluent Jewish suburbs took shape outside other big cities, from Scarsdale in Westchester to the postwar enclaves that would later draw retirees south to Boca Raton. Highland Park was the Chicago version of that story, distinguished mainly by how early it had begun.
Building the institutions
A community measures itself by what it builds, and the postwar decades on the North Shore were a building boom of synagogues.
North Shore Congregation Israel had begun in 1920 as the local branch of Chicago’s Sinai Congregation, making it the oldest Reform synagogue on the North Shore. In 1964 it opened an extraordinary new sanctuary in neighbouring Glencoe, designed by the architect Minoru Yamasaki, whose later work included the World Trade Center. Its soaring concrete fan vaults, filled with coloured glass, remain one of the most striking pieces of religious architecture in the Chicago area.
Congregation Solel was founded in 1957 by a group who had relocated from the South Side, an offshoot of Chicago’s oldest synagogue, KAM. The Conservative North Suburban Synagogue Beth El took over a grand 1911 mansion on Sheridan Road. Together with Reform, Conservative, and Chabad congregations, these institutions gave the town a dense religious infrastructure that anchored Jewish family life for decades.
The Landmarks
Ravinia Festival, 200 Ravinia Park Road. The oldest outdoor music festival in North America, open since 1904 and the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1936. For generations of North Shore Jewish families, a summer night on the Ravinia lawn, blanket spread and wine poured, has been close to a sacrament.
North Shore Congregation Israel, 1185 Sheridan Road, Glencoe. Just over the Highland Park line, the Reform congregation rooted in 1920 worships in Yamasaki’s 1964 sanctuary. Its arching white vaults look out toward Lake Michigan and remain a landmark of postwar American synagogue design.
North Suburban Synagogue Beth El, 1175 Sheridan Road. The Conservative congregation made its home in a twenty-room mansion built in 1911 for businessman Edward Valentine Price and designed by architect Ernest Mayo, turning a Gilded Age house into a centre of Jewish worship and learning.
Mizrahi Kosher Market, 300 Skokie Valley Road. A neighbourhood destination for kosher meats, baked goods, and Middle Eastern specialties, the kind of shop where neighbours trade recipes over the counter and where keeping kosher in the suburbs is simply taken for granted.
Shaevitz Market, 712 Central Avenue. A kosher butcher and deli on the downtown strip, known for specialty cuts and prepared foods, serving North Shore families preparing for Shabbat and the holidays.
Highland Park High School, 433 Vine Avenue. The flagship of Township High School District 113, one of the highest-ranked public school districts in Illinois and the country. Its quality has long been part of why Jewish families chose Highland Park and stayed to raise children here.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Highland Park trace back, almost all of them, to the city to the south. The earliest summer families were German Jews whose roots ran through nineteenth-century immigration from Central Europe, the merchant class that had built Chicago’s Reform congregations.
The much larger postwar wave came from the Eastern European immigrant stock that had filled the West Side. These were the children and grandchildren of Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Romanian Jews who had landed near Maxwell Street, raised families in Lawndale and Albany Park, and then moved north as soon as they could afford to. It was the same Ashkenazi immigration that built the dense Orthodox world of Borough Park in Brooklyn, here channelled instead into a leafy lakefront suburb.
What pulled them to Highland Park specifically was a combination an immigrant family could not easily refuse: an established Jewish community, the best public schools in the region, lake and ravine landscape, and the cultural draw of Ravinia. The town had been welcoming Jewish families since before most American suburbs existed.
Highland Park Today
According to a 2020 study of metropolitan Chicago by researchers at Brandeis University and the University of Chicago, Highland Park is about fifty percent Jewish, roughly fifteen thousand of its thirty thousand residents. That is the highest Jewish share of any Chicago suburb, and it confirms what was true a century ago: this is the heart of the Jewish North Shore.
The town that exists now is comfortable and settled. Families still send their children to District 113 schools, still gather on the Ravinia lawn, still shop for brisket before the holidays. The congregations have consolidated as Reform Judaism nationally has, with Solel and the Lakeside Congregation merging in 2019, but the institutions endure.
The Jewishness of Highland Park is not loud. There is no single dense corridor of shopfronts, no street that announces itself the way some city neighbourhoods do. It is woven instead into the ordinary texture of a North Shore suburb: the preschool drop-off, the bar mitzvah season, the kosher counter, the synagogue parking lots full on a Friday evening. Half the town is Jewish, and for most of the families here that fact is simply the water they swim in, inherited from grandparents who once rode the train up from the city for a summer by the lake.
And the community carries a wound. On the morning of 4 July 2022, a gunman fired on Highland Park’s Independence Day parade from a rooftop on Central Avenue, killing seven people and wounding dozens. Among the dead was Jacki Sundheim, sixty-three, a lifelong member and beloved longtime staffer at North Shore Congregation Israel, where she had taught preschool and guided families through b’nei mitzvah and weddings for decades. Her loss struck the Jewish community with particular force. In the years since, the town has held memorial walks and moments of silence, planned permanent places of remembrance near city hall and Port Clinton Square, and slowly, deliberately, returned to its Fourth of July traditions. The grief is real, and so is the resolve to keep gathering.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Jewish is Highland Park, Illinois?
A 2020 Brandeis and University of Chicago study found Highland Park is about fifty percent Jewish, roughly fifteen thousand of thirty thousand residents. That gives the Jews in Highland Park, Illinois the highest share of any Chicago suburb.
Why did so many Jewish families move to Highland Park?
The town drew an early Jewish summer colony around 1900, then a large postwar wave from Chicago’s West Side neighbourhoods like Lawndale and Albany Park. An established community, top schools, the lakefront, and Ravinia made it a natural destination.
What are the main synagogues in Highland Park?
The area is served by North Shore Congregation Israel, the historic Reform congregation in neighbouring Glencoe, the merged Makom Solel Lakeside, the Conservative North Suburban Synagogue Beth El, and Chabad. The Jews in Highland Park, Illinois have one of the densest synagogue networks of any Chicago suburb.
What is Ravinia and why does it matter to the community?
Ravinia Festival, open since 1904, is the oldest outdoor music festival in North America and the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Summer evenings on its lawn have been a fixture of North Shore Jewish family life for generations.
Where can you find kosher food in Highland Park?
Highland Park has kosher markets including Mizrahi Kosher Market on Skokie Valley Road and Shaevitz Market on Central Avenue, offering kosher meats, deli, baked goods, and prepared foods for Shabbat and the holidays.
How did the community respond to the 2022 parade shooting?
After seven people were killed at the 4 July 2022 parade, including longtime synagogue staffer Jacki Sundheim, the community held memorial walks and moments of silence, planned permanent remembrance sites, and gradually restored its Fourth of July traditions.
If your family’s story passed through Highland Park, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Lawndale two-flat or an Albany Park apartment, to a house above the ravines on the North Shore, to wherever you are now.