On a Sunday morning in West Bloomfield, the parking lot at St. Thomas Chaldean Catholic Church on Maple Road fills with families who, two generations ago, would have been walking to Mass off Seven Mile in Detroit. The Chaldeans in West Bloomfield are the prosperous chapter of a very old story: an Iraqi Christian people, rooted in a single village near the ruins of Nineveh, who built their American foundation in corner groceries and then carried it north into one of Oakland County’s most comfortable suburbs.
The Place
West Bloomfield Township sits in the lake country of central Oakland County, a sprawl of water and wooded subdivisions between Pontiac and Farmington Hills. It is one of metro Detroit’s wealthier suburbs: the 2024 estimated median household income was roughly 146,000 dollars, and the median home value approached 547,000 dollars, well above the Michigan average.
The township is home to about 68,000 people, with a large Jewish community, a substantial Lebanese presence, and, woven quietly among them, thousands of Chaldean Catholic families. They came not as the first wave to arrive in America, but as the wave that had already made it.
You can read the geography in the institutions. A Chaldean cultural museum inside a country club, a 15-million-dollar foundation campus on Walnut Lake Road, a parish on Maple: these are not the marks of a community passing through. They are the marks of one that decided to stay and to be seen.
How It Became Chaldean
One village near Nineveh
Almost every Chaldean family in metro Detroit traces back to the same place. By most accounts more than 90 percent of the community descends from Telkaif, also spelled Tel Keppe, a Christian town on the Nineveh Plain in northern Iraq, near the ruins of ancient Nineveh outside Mosul.
Telkaif’s people are Chaldean Catholics, members of an Eastern rite in communion with Rome whose liturgy still carries Aramaic, the language of the region for thousands of years. The town formally recognised the authority of the Roman pontiff around 1830, and through the violence of the early twentieth century it often served as a refuge for Christians fleeing Ottoman and Kurdish attacks.
That history of being a minority, devout, mercantile, watchful, travelled with them. It shaped how they settled in America: close family networks, a strong church at the centre, and a sharp instinct for business. The same instincts that kept Telkaif intact under pressure would later build a community in Oakland County from almost nothing.
The Motor City pull
Chaldeans began arriving in Detroit around 1910, drawn by the same force that pulled in so many others: Henry Ford’s five-dollar day and the promise of factory wages. They were a tiny group at first. One count put just 908 Chaldeans in Detroit in 1943.
The first significant institution arrived in 1947, when the community founded its first church, Mother of God, near Euclid and Second Avenue. Around it grew the neighbourhood later known as Chaldean Town, a walkable stretch along West Seven Mile Road lined with homes, markets, bakeries and coffee houses.
From the store counter up
What set the Chaldeans apart economically was the grocery store. When national chains abandoned Detroit’s neighbourhoods in the decades after the 1967 unrest, Chaldean merchants bought the abandoned storefronts and ran them as family businesses, often inherited from departing Italian and Jewish owners.
The pattern compounded. By various trade estimates Chaldean families came to own the large majority of Detroit’s independent supermarkets and the overwhelming share of its liquor and convenience stores, and they organised into the Detroit Independent grocers’ association. The store counter funded college tuition, then second stores, then real estate, hotels and pizza franchises across southeast Michigan.
It was hard, often dangerous work, and the families who did it carried a reputation for grit. Owners extended credit before credit cards existed, delivered groceries to neighbours who could not travel, and learned the rhythms of city blocks that the chains had written off. The wealth that now reads as suburban comfort was earned a transaction at a time.
Crossing Eight Mile
As families prospered they moved north along a clear path: out of Detroit into Oak Park and Southfield, then on to West Bloomfield and Farmington Hills, and for some into Birmingham and Bloomfield Township. The same northward arc shaped the area’s Lebanese families in West Bloomfield and the Lebanese professionals of Bloomfield Hills.
The 1980s sharpened the move. As crime and the crack epidemic hit Detroit’s east side, families, especially the American-raised second generation, sought safer streets and stronger schools. Between 1990 and 2000 alone the Chaldean population of Oakland County grew by roughly 11,000.
The institutions followed the people. By the 1990s Chaldean churches were opening across the suburbs, and West Bloomfield, with its lakes and its good schools, became one of the favoured destinations, much as it had for the Jewish families of West Bloomfield a generation earlier.
The Landmarks
St. Thomas Chaldean Catholic Church, 6900 West Maple Road. The community’s anchor in West Bloomfield, St. Thomas offers Mass in Chaldean, English and Arabic, with bible study, youth groups and a grotto. It sits up the road from the area’s Jewish community institutions, two faiths sharing the same suburb.
Mother of God Cathedral, 25585 Berg Road, Southfield. Though just over the border in Southfield, this is the mother church of the community. Descended from that first 1947 parish, the present cathedral was consecrated in 1980 and became the seat of the Eparchy of St. Thomas the Apostle in 1982, the centre of Chaldean Catholic life in America.
Chaldean Cultural Center, 5600 Walnut Lake Road. Housed inside Shenandoah Country Club, this is the world’s first museum dedicated to Chaldean history, tracing the people from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Detroit. It opened in 2017 and tells the Telkaif-to-Motor-City journey in galleries.
Shenandoah Country Club, 5600 Walnut Lake Road. Described as the largest Chaldean country club in America, Shenandoah is the community’s grand banquet and gathering place, host to weddings, galas and the Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce’s annual awards dinner. Its roots run back to a community association formed in 1943.
Chaldean Community Foundation, CCF West, 2075 Walnut Lake Road. Opened in 2025, this roughly 42,000-square-foot, 15-million-dollar centre brought the Chaldean Community Foundation, the Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce and the Chaldean News under one roof, with a library, kitchen, theatre and business incubator on seven acres.
Ishtar Ethnic Food, 7380 Haggerty Road. Open since 2006, Ishtar is a neighbourhood market for Chaldean and Middle Eastern groceries, with a bakery, halal meat counter and produce that draws families from across the township. It is the corner-store tradition grown into a full ethnic supermarket.
Princess Mediterranean Grill, off Orchard Lake Road. A small Chaldean-run restaurant whose menu lists Iraqi dishes rather than the more familiar Lebanese fare, it is one of the spots where the community’s home cooking is served to the wider suburb.
Where They Came From
The Chaldean story is unusually concentrated. Where many diasporas draw from a region, this one draws from a town: Telkaif and the surrounding Christian villages of the Nineveh Plain, in Iraq’s Mosul province.
Later waves added other Iraqi Christian towns, especially after the upheavals of the Gulf wars and the persecution that followed 2003, but the cultural core, the dialect of Aramaic, the patron saints, the family networks, still runs back to that one place near Nineveh. When West Bloomfield Chaldeans speak of the village, they often mean the same village.
That concentration explains the density of community life in the suburb. When nearly everyone’s grandparents knew one another in the old country, a parish, a chamber dinner or a wedding at Shenandoah is also a reunion. The networks that moved families from Telkaif to Detroit and then to West Bloomfield never really broke; they simply changed addresses.
West Bloomfield Today
Today the Chaldeans of West Bloomfield are a settled, professional community: doctors, lawyers, developers, chamber members and the grown children of grocers. The township is one node in a wider geography that runs through Oakland and Macomb counties, home to the largest Chaldean population anywhere outside Iraq, estimated well above 150,000 across southeast Michigan.
They share the suburb without dissolving into it. A family might attend St. Thomas in Chaldean on Sunday, shop the halal counter at Ishtar, and hold a wedding at Shenandoah, all within a few miles of homes whose owners came up through Detroit corner stores.
The younger generation is fluent in two worlds. They grow up in West Bloomfield’s well-regarded schools, head off to Michigan and Wayne State, and come back as professionals rather than shopkeepers. Yet many still learn fragments of the church Aramaic, still gather for the feast days, still know exactly which village their name comes from.
What is striking is how much the community has chosen to build in West Bloomfield rather than simply live there. The cultural centre, the new foundation campus, the cathedral just over the line in Southfield: a people who once worried about being remembered have spent their prosperity making sure they will be. The story that began in Telkaif, and passed through Detroit’s Chaldean Town, now has a permanent address in the lake country.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are the Chaldeans in West Bloomfield, Michigan?
The Chaldeans in West Bloomfield, Michigan are Iraqi Christians, members of the Chaldean Catholic Church, an Eastern rite in communion with Rome. Most descend from the town of Telkaif near Nineveh in northern Iraq and arrived in the suburb after their families first settled in Detroit.
Why did Chaldeans move from Detroit to West Bloomfield?
As Chaldean families prospered in grocery and retail businesses, they moved north for safer neighbourhoods and stronger schools, following a path from Detroit through Oak Park and Southfield into West Bloomfield and Farmington Hills. The migration accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s.
Is there a Chaldean church in West Bloomfield?
Yes. St. Thomas Chaldean Catholic Church at 6900 West Maple Road serves the West Bloomfield community with Mass in Chaldean, English and Arabic. The community’s cathedral, Mother of God, is a short drive away in neighbouring Southfield.
What is the Chaldean Cultural Center?
The Chaldean Cultural Center, located inside Shenandoah Country Club on Walnut Lake Road in West Bloomfield, is the world’s first museum dedicated to Chaldean history. Its galleries trace the people from ancient Mesopotamia through Telkaif to present-day metro Detroit.
How are Chaldeans different from Lebanese and Jewish residents of West Bloomfield?
The Chaldeans in West Bloomfield are an Iraqi Christian, Aramaic-heritage community, distinct from the township’s large Jewish community and its Lebanese residents. The three groups share the same affluent suburb but have separate languages, faiths and origin stories.
How many Chaldeans live in metro Detroit?
Estimates place the Chaldean population of southeast Michigan well above 150,000, the largest concentration anywhere outside Iraq. They are clustered mainly in Oakland and Macomb counties, with West Bloomfield among the favoured Oakland County communities.
If your family’s story passed through West Bloomfield, or any of the places Chaldeans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the Christian villages of the Nineveh Plain to a Sunday Mass on Maple Road, to wherever you are now.