On a 3.7 acre stretch of Church Street in Skokie, a building that once echoed with the splashing of a Jewish community swimming pool now fills on Sunday mornings with the ancient liturgy of the Church of the East. The Assyrians in Skokie have made this northern Chicago suburb one of the most important addresses for their people anywhere in the world, a place where a stateless nation has built something that looks remarkably like a home.
The Place
Skokie sits roughly 15 miles north of Chicago’s downtown Loop, a village of around 65,850 people pressed between the city’s edge and the affluent North Shore. For decades it was best known as a Jewish suburb. At its mid 1960s peak nearly 60 per cent of residents were Jewish, the largest proportion of any Chicago suburb, and an estimated 8,000 Holocaust survivors settled there between the 1950s and 1970s, according to the village’s documented history.
The prosperity came from that postwar boom: baby boom families leaving Chicago, a 1920s real estate surge, and the arrival of Old Orchard Shopping Center, now Westfield Old Orchard, which turned the village into a regional retail hub. Skokie’s household median income sits near $74,725, with family income closer to $93,491.
Today the Jewish share has fallen to roughly 28 per cent, and into the space the city’s history left has come another people who know exile in their bones.
How It Became Assyrian
The Assyrians are a Christian people indigenous to the lands where Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria meet, speakers of modern dialects of Aramaic, the language of the ancient Near East. They have no state of their own. To understand why upwards of 20,000 of them now live in one Illinois village, you have to follow a century of leaving.
The first arrivals
Assyrian migration to Chicago began at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century. The earliest arrivals often intended to stay only temporarily, to earn money to send back to families in the old country before returning. Many never did.
Their journeys were extraordinary. One documented family, the Nimrods, traced their origins to Seeri Village in Iran and travelled through Iraq, Russia, Manchuria, India and Italy before reaching Chicago in the early 1900s. The Assyrian American Association of Chicago was established in 1917, a sign of how early the community organised itself.
The genocide and after
What turned a trickle into a flight was catastrophe. During the First World War the Assyrian population of upper Mesopotamia and the Urmia region of north western Iran was massacred and forcibly displaced between 1914 and 1920. In 1918 the Assyrian population of Urmia was nearly wiped out, with hundreds killed sheltering in mission buildings and some 200 surrounding villages destroyed during the Assyrian genocide.
Survivors scattered across the world. Many found their way to Chicago, where an Assyrian church community already existed. The original Mar Sargis parish in the city served nearly 300 families by 1953, and on Palm Sunday that year Patriarch Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII consecrated a new parish building at 1850 West Cuyler before a congregation of around 400.
The wars that filled the suburbs
The largest waves came later. From the 1970s to the 1990s, many Assyrians immigrated to Chicago from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey, with thousands arriving in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War. These were not single travellers earning wages to send home. They were families fleeing instability and persecution, and they came to stay.
The Chicago metropolitan area is now home to an estimated 90,000 Assyrians, by some counts approaching 100,000, one of the largest Assyrian diaspora populations in the world and the second largest in the United States. The historic centre of gravity was West Rogers Park on Chicago’s far north side, the neighbourhood that anchored the community for generations. You can read more about that older heartland in our piece on the Assyrians in West Rogers Park.
The move north
As families prospered, they did what immigrant communities across Chicago have always done. They moved outward to the near north and north western suburbs, into Skokie, Morton Grove, Niles, Lincolnwood, Des Plaines and beyond. The core of Assyrian Illinois now stretches across Rogers Park, Albany Park, Skokie, Lincolnwood, Morton Grove and Des Plaines.
Skokie became the keystone. The Assyrian Universal Alliance Foundation estimates upwards of 20,000 Assyrians live in the village, potentially the largest single ethnic group there. The transformation of a once heavily Jewish suburb into a major Assyrian centre is one of the quiet remakings of metropolitan Chicago, and it reached a symbolic peak when, on 2 March 2026, more than 200 people gathered at the Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park to raise the Assyrian flag, the result of nearly a decade of advocacy.
The Landmarks
Assyrian Community Center, 5050 Church Street. The heart of Assyrian Skokie occupies the former Mayer Kaplan Jewish Community Center, built in 1968 and opened in 1971. The Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East Diocese purchased the 83,000 square foot building on 3.7 acres in December 2018. It is described as the largest Assyrian community center in the United States, hosting Sunday services, Assyrian language classes, bible study and a youth group of more than 120 members.
Mar Sargis Parish, 5050 Church Street. The parish that once met in Lincoln Park and later on Cuyler Avenue now worships inside the centre’s gymnasium, consecrated at this location on 30 April 2022. Its priest is the Reverend Archdeacon William Toma. There are plans to convert the building’s abandoned natatorium, the old swimming pool hall, into a 6,658 square foot worship space for 300 parishioners by autumn 2027.
Assyrian National Council of Illinois, 9131 Niles Center Road. One of more than 20 Assyrian organisations and churches in the Chicago area, the council is a long standing civic and cultural anchor for the community. Mar Sargis has even planned a shuttle bus service to use the council’s parking on busy worship days.
Taste of Assyria, 4400 Golf Road, Skokie. A family run restaurant serving traditional Assyrian dishes, open six days a week into the evening. It is one of the everyday institutions, alongside caterers like Urnina Banquets, where the cuisine of the homeland stays alive on Skokie tables.
Zad, 3910 Dempster Street, Skokie. A Middle Eastern grocery and food establishment with more than four decades behind it, serving Skokie and neighbouring Lincolnwood and Niles. Around it cluster other markets that stock the ingredients of the region, from Ashtar Food Market to Brothers Food Market.
Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park, near Dempster Street and McCormick Boulevard. On 2 March 2026 this park became the site where the Assyrian flag was raised before a crowd of more than 200. The village had amended its flag policy in January to allow founding participants of its 1991 Festival of Cultures to fly their flags, and the Assyrian community took its place among them.
Westfield Old Orchard, Skokie. Not an Assyrian landmark but the commercial spine of the suburb, the shopping centre whose postwar rise helped make Skokie prosperous enough to become a place worth settling. Its presence is part of why families chose this village rather than another.
Where They Came From
Assyrian Skokie is not the product of one village or one country. It is the gathered remnant of a homeland that spans four modern states. The deepest roots run to the Urmia region of north western Iran and to the plains and mountains of northern Iraq, with families also tracing their lines to south eastern Turkey and north eastern Syria.
What binds them is not a passport but a faith and a language. Most belong to the Assyrian Church of the East or its sister churches, and they pray and increasingly teach their children in dialects of Aramaic. The community’s calendar still turns on ancient festivals, above all Kha b-Nisan, the Assyrian New Year celebrated on the first of April, whose roots reach back to the Mesopotamian feast of Akitu.
The chain migration that filled Skokie followed the oldest logic there is. Where a church stood and relatives had already settled, the next family came. Chicago’s existing Assyrian parishes pulled refugees of the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars, and the suburbs pulled their grown children.
Skokie Today
Walk Church Street on a Sunday and the remaking is plain. The building that Jewish Chicago raised in the optimism of the late 1960s now serves a Christian people from the other side of the world, its gymnasium an improvised sanctuary, its old pool waiting to become a chapel for 300. Few places capture the layering of American immigrant history so neatly within a single set of walls.
The community is visible now in ways it was not a generation ago. An Assyrian flag flies in a public park. Skokie elected a mayor, Ann Tennes, who stood proudly at its raising, and Niles Township counts Assyrian American officials. Restaurants, grocers and a community council give the village an everyday Assyrian texture, and the youth group of more than 120 suggests the next generation is staying close.
For comparison, the surrounding suburbs tell a wider story of immigrant Chicago reaching outward, from the Pakistanis in Schaumburg to the Greeks in Palos Hills and the Greeks in Oak Lawn. The Assyrians in Skokie are part of that same suburban remaking, but with a difference that sits at the centre of their identity: they have no country to return to. For them, building a centre in Skokie is not nostalgia. It is the closest thing they have to a capital.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Assyrians live in Skokie, Illinois?
The Assyrian Universal Alliance Foundation estimates upwards of 20,000 Assyrians live in Skokie, potentially the largest single ethnic group in the village. The wider Chicago metropolitan area is home to an estimated 90,000 to 100,000 Assyrians, one of the largest such populations in the world.
Why are there so many Assyrians in Skokie?
The Assyrians in Skokie are part of a community that first settled in Chicago in the early twentieth century and grew enormously through refugees fleeing the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars from the 1970s to the 1990s. As families prospered they moved from West Rogers Park into the northern suburbs, with Skokie becoming a major centre.
What is the Assyrian Community Center in Skokie?
It is an 83,000 square foot facility at 5050 Church Street, formerly the Mayer Kaplan Jewish Community Center, purchased by the Assyrian Church of the East Diocese in December 2018. Described as the largest Assyrian community center in the United States, it houses Mar Sargis Parish along with language classes, bible study and a youth group.
Where did the Assyrians come from?
Assyrians are an indigenous Christian people of the Middle East whose homeland spans parts of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. Those in Skokie trace their roots especially to the Urmia region of Iran and to northern Iraq, and they speak modern dialects of Aramaic.
What religion are the Assyrians in Skokie?
Most belong to the Assyrian Church of the East or related churches. Mar Sargis Parish, consecrated at its Skokie location in 2022, worships within the Assyrian Community Center under the Reverend Archdeacon William Toma, with plans to build a dedicated worship hall by 2027.
When was the Assyrian flag raised in Skokie?
The Assyrian flag was raised at the Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park on 2 March 2026 before a crowd of more than 200, after nearly a decade of advocacy. Skokie had amended its flag policy in January 2026 to allow founding participants of its 1991 Festival of Cultures to display their flags.
If your family’s story passed through Skokie, or any of the places Assyrians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the villages of Urmia and the plains of northern Iraq, to a converted community centre on Church Street, to wherever you are now.