Drive north on Buffalo Grove Road on a Friday afternoon and the rhythm of the place announces itself before any sign does. Cars turn into the lot at Congregation Beth Am, a Reform sanctuary on Abbott Court, while a few minutes east the bakery cases at Shalom fill with challah for the evening. The story of the Jews in Buffalo Grove is among the youngest in this series, a community built almost entirely within living memory, on land that was dairy pasture when its grandparents were still raising families on the West Side of Chicago.
The Place
Buffalo Grove sits about thirty miles northwest of downtown Chicago, straddling the line between Cook and Lake counties. It was farmland until the middle of the twentieth century, named for the buffalo that once grazed the trees along Buffalo Creek, and worked for generations by German Catholic dairy farmers who supplied milk and cheese to the growing city.
The village incorporated on 7 March 1958 with just 164 residents. Within two years that number had passed 1,400, and the subdivisions kept coming through the rest of the century. Today Buffalo Grove is a settled, affluent suburb of roughly 40,000 people, consistently ranked among the best places to live in Illinois, with some of the highest school rankings in the state.
How It Became Jewish
The Jews of Buffalo Grove did not arrive from across an ocean. They came from across town, in one of the great internal migrations of American Jewish life, and they did it within a single lifetime.
The City They Left
For most of the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish Chicago meant the West Side: Lawndale, Douglas Park, the dense blocks of Maxwell Street further in. After the Second World War, those neighbourhoods emptied as a generation of veterans and their young families chased lawns, schools and space.
The first wave went to the closer suburbs. Skokie became the centre of gravity, its population swelling with Jewish families and, famously, with Holocaust survivors who rebuilt their lives there. West Rogers Park, on the city’s far north edge, held the Orthodox core. By the 1960s these were established, crowded, complete Jewish communities.
The Push Further Out
The children of Skokie and West Rogers Park grew up, and when it came time to buy their own homes in the 1970s and 1980s, the developable land lay further northwest. Buffalo Grove, Long Grove, Wheeling, Vernon Hills and Lincolnshire were filling with new subdivisions, good schools and reasonable prices, all within reach of jobs along the expanding corridors.
Jewish families followed the construction. They were not pioneers in any romantic sense. They were a generation that had grown up Jewish in Chicago and its inner suburbs, and who simply moved the whole apparatus of Jewish life, the congregation, the school, the bakery, a little further out to where the houses were new.
What they were chasing was specific and practical. The lots were larger and the mortgages were within reach of a young accountant or schoolteacher. The schools were new and well funded. And crucially, they were not moving into the unknown: an aunt, a cousin or a college friend had usually already bought a few streets over, so the move felt less like leaving the community than like the community relocating around them.
Building Institutions From Scratch
What makes Buffalo Grove distinctive is how quickly the infrastructure followed. In the late 1960s a group of families across Buffalo Grove, Long Grove and Wheeling began meeting with the goal of founding a Conservative synagogue. That effort became Congregation Beth Judea, formally established in 1969, with its first building dedicated in the early 1970s.
The Reform community organised next. Congregation Beth Am was established in 1979 on Abbott Court in Buffalo Grove and grew into one of the area’s larger Reform congregations. A generation later, in 2001, a hundred members broke from another local congregation to found Kol Hadash, a Humanistic Jewish congregation that holds services and lifecycle events in the area, reflecting how varied the community had become.
By 1995 Buffalo Grove counted six synagogues, and more than a quarter of the village was Jewish. The wider northwest cluster, taking in Long Grove, Wheeling, Arlington Heights, Lincolnshire and Vernon Hills, supported nine or more synagogues and Jewish institutions, and had come to hold a substantial share of the Chicago area’s Jewish households.
The Northwest Suburban Jewish community also gained a communal anchor when the JCC moved to Buffalo Grove in 1984 to serve the swelling population, eventually operating an early childhood centre at Woodland Commons that ran until 2014, when programming consolidated at the Lake County JCC campus. The pattern was complete in a way that took older Jewish neighbourhoods three generations to achieve. This one did it in roughly thirty years.
The Landmarks
Congregation Beth Judea, 5304 RFD, Long Grove. The Conservative congregation born from 1960s living-room meetings, just over the village line in Long Grove but serving Buffalo Grove families since its founding in 1969. Its building was expanded in 1985 and again in 1999 as membership grew, a physical record of the community’s rise.
Congregation Beth Am, 1370 Abbott Court, Buffalo Grove. Established in 1979, this Reform congregation describes itself as warm and accepting, with education running from kindergarten through high school alongside a Men’s Club, Sisterhood and adult learning. For many Buffalo Grove families it is the spiritual centre of the week.
Kol Hadash Humanistic Congregation, near Old Half Day Road, Lincolnshire. Founded in 2001 by a hundred breakaway members, Kol Hadash offers a secular, human-centred form of Jewish life. Its members are visible enough in local civic life to march in the Buffalo Grove pride parade, a small marker of how rooted the community has become.
Shalom Bakery, 1165 Arlington Heights Road, Buffalo Grove. Under Chicago Rabbinical Council supervision, Shalom turns out bagels baked on site, lox and whitefish, and the challah that fills kitchens before Shabbat. It is the kind of everyday kosher anchor that signals a community is permanent, not provisional.
Jewel-Osco, 79 McHenry Road, Buffalo Grove. An ordinary supermarket that tells an extraordinary demographic story: its kosher selection and certified prepared foods exist because the surrounding households demand them. In Buffalo Grove, kosher is a mainstream grocery category, not a speciality errand.
JCC at Woodland Commons, 280 Half Day Road, Buffalo Grove. The campus where the Northwest Suburban JCC put down roots in 1984 and later ran an early childhood centre, for three decades a hub of preschool, camp and family programming that helped knit the dispersed new suburb into a community.
Adlai E. Stevenson High School, Lincolnshire. The nationally ranked public high school in District 125 that serves much of Buffalo Grove. Top schools were a central reason Jewish families chose the northwest suburbs, and Stevenson remains one of the village’s strongest draws for families weighing where to settle.
Where They Came From
Trace a Buffalo Grove Jewish family back two or three generations and the route is remarkably consistent. The deepest roots usually run to Eastern Europe, the shtetls and cities of the Russian Empire, Poland, Lithuania and beyond, the great wave of immigration that reached Chicago between roughly 1880 and 1924.
Those immigrants settled on the West Side, far from the dense Hasidic enclaves of cities like Borough Park in Brooklyn, in a more secular, upwardly mobile mould. Their children moved to Skokie, West Rogers Park and the nearer North Shore in the postwar decades. Their grandchildren made the final hop to Buffalo Grove and the northwest suburbs. The Holocaust survivors who anchored Skokie shaped the values their descendants carried outward, a determination to build Jewish institutions wherever they landed.
So the origin region of the Jews in Buffalo Grove is, in the truest sense, Chicago itself. This is a community whose chain of migration is measured not in steamship manifests but in suburban moving vans, each one a few miles further from the lake.
Buffalo Grove Today
Buffalo Grove today is a comfortable, established suburb where the Jewish community is woven quietly into the ordinary fabric of village life rather than concentrated on a single commercial street. There is no Jewish quarter here in the old sense. Instead there are congregations a short drive apart, a bakery, a supermarket aisle, schools full of families who keep their own calendar of holidays alongside the public one.
The institutions have matured. Beth Judea, Beth Am and the humanistic Kol Hadash represent three distinct ways of being Jewish, all within a few miles of one another, which is itself a sign of a community large and secure enough to sustain real variety. It is a settled affluence that echoes other established Jewish suburbs, from the lakefront mansions of Jewish Highland Park to the snowbird condos of Jewish Boca Raton. The closing of the Buffalo Grove JCC early childhood centre in 2014, with programming shifting north to Lake County, is a reminder that suburban Jewish life keeps migrating, following young families even further out.
Still, the centre of gravity holds. For a community that did not exist in any organised form before the late 1960s, Buffalo Grove has built something durable: synagogues with second and third generations in the pews, kosher food on the shelves, and a place that the children who grew up here now think of, simply, as home.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Jewish community in Buffalo Grove, Illinois?
The Jewish community in Buffalo Grove is substantial. By 1995 more than a quarter of the village’s population was Jewish, and the village had six synagogues. The wider northwest suburban cluster came to hold a significant share of the entire Chicago area’s Jewish households.
When did Jews move to Buffalo Grove?
The Jews in Buffalo Grove arrived mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, part of a northwest migration out of Chicago and older inner suburbs like Skokie and West Rogers Park. Organised Jewish life began earlier, with Congregation Beth Judea forming in 1969.
What synagogues are there in Buffalo Grove?
The area is served by Congregation Beth Judea (Conservative, founded 1969, in adjacent Long Grove), Congregation Beth Am (Reform, founded 1979, on Abbott Court), and Kol Hadash Humanistic Congregation (founded 2001). By 1995 the village counted six synagogues in total.
Where can I find kosher food in Buffalo Grove?
Shalom Bakery on Arlington Heights Road, under Chicago Rabbinical Council supervision, bakes bagels, challah and offers lox and whitefish. The Jewel-Osco on McHenry Road carries a strong kosher grocery selection, reflecting steady local demand.
Why did so many Jewish families choose Buffalo Grove?
New housing, affordability and outstanding schools drew Jewish families to Buffalo Grove. The village feeds into nationally ranked schools including Adlai E. Stevenson High School, a major draw for the families who built the community in the 1970s and 1980s.
How does Buffalo Grove relate to Skokie and Highland Park?
Many of the Jews in Buffalo Grove descend from families who first settled in Skokie and West Rogers Park after leaving Chicago’s West Side, then moved further northwest. The community sits within the same broader North Shore and northwest suburban Jewish world as Highland Park.
If your family’s story passed through Buffalo Grove, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the shtetls of Eastern Europe to Chicago’s West Side, to Skokie, to a new house in Buffalo Grove, to wherever you are now.