On a Saturday morning in Deerfield, the parking lot at 1201 Lake Cook Road fills early, and families walk the last stretch on foot. The story of the Jews in Deerfield is the story of how a quiet farming village north of Chicago, one that in 1959 fought a national battle to keep itself white, became one of the most comfortably Jewish suburbs on the North Shore. Both things are true, and the second could not have happened without the first being reckoned with.
The Place
Deerfield sits about 28 miles north of downtown Chicago, straddling the line between Lake and Cook counties on the corridor known as the North Shore. It was settled in 1835 by Horace Lamb and Jacob Cadwell, first called Cadwell’s Corner, and incorporated as a village in 1903 with roughly 400 residents.
For most of the twentieth century it was farmland slowly turning into commuter homes. Today it is among the wealthiest towns in Illinois, with a 2020 population of 19,196 and a median household income above $185,000.
The money is partly corporate. Walgreens Boots Alliance, Baxter, and Fortune Brands all keep large operations here. But the draw for families has always been the schools, the leafy quiet, and the easy reach of both the city and the lake.
How It Became Jewish
To understand Jewish Deerfield you have to start with the city the families left, and with the year Deerfield nearly closed its doors.
The West Side and West Rogers Park
Chicago’s Jews built their first dense neighbourhoods on the West Side, around Maxwell Street and Lawndale, in the immigrant decades before and after 1900. It was a world apart from the Hasidic strongholds of Brooklyn neighbourhoods like Borough Park, but it produced the same outward pattern of family advancement. As those families prospered they moved north, and by the early 1960s West Rogers Park, also called West Ridge, was roughly three-quarters Jewish, with more than 47,000 Jewish residents anchored along Devon Avenue.
That neighbourhood was the staging ground. Children who grew up near Devon Avenue, and their parents who remembered Lawndale, were the ones who began drifting to the northern and north-western suburbs in the mid-1960s. Deerfield was one terminus of that journey, reached after the railroad and the Edens Expressway made the commute back to the city short. Others on the same road stopped first in the Jewish suburb of Skokie, or continued out to the newer Jewish enclave of Buffalo Grove.
The pattern was not unique to Jews; it was the post-war suburban migration writ large. But for Jewish families it had a particular shape. They left a dense, walkable, intensely Jewish city neighbourhood for places where Jewishness had to be rebuilt rather than inherited from the street. The first task in any new suburb was the same: find enough families, rent a school gym, and start a congregation.
The 1959 controversy
Any honest account of Deerfield has to pause in November 1959. That month the village learned that a developer, Progress Development Corporation, backed by the integrationist builder Morris Milgram, had quietly acquired two tracts and intended to sell homes to Black and white buyers alike. The parcels became known as the Floral Park and Pear Tree subdivisions.
Two model homes were going up with board approval when the village building commissioner halted work over claimed code violations, and Chicago papers broke the news. At the time Deerfield counted 12 Black residents out of 11,786.
On 7 December 1959 the Park Board moved to designate both subdivisions as park land and to take them by condemnation. A referendum on 21 December authorised a bond issue to buy the tracts. Progress sued, charging conspiracy to deny civil rights; the case wound through the courts and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear it. Deerfield was branded, in the national press, the Little Rock of the North.
The land became parks. The integrated subdivision was never built. For decades the episode sat unspoken, until residents and the District 113 schools began, in recent years, to teach and publicly reckon with it.
A Jewish suburb takes shape
The Jewish families who arrived from the city in the 1960s and after were entering a place still living with that history. What they built was nevertheless durable. Beginning in earnest in the early 1980s, observers noted a large influx of Jewish, Asian, and Greek residents, and the congregations followed the people.
In the summer of 1976, twenty young Deerfield families founded Congregation B’nai Tikvah, meeting first in South Park Elementary, then in the Wilmot School gym, before settling into their own building in 1993. Other congregations relocated outward from the city and the inner suburbs to be near where their members now lived.
The sequence tells you something about how these suburbs filled. The families arrived first, drawn by the schools and the houses, and the institutions chased them. A congregation born in a borrowed gymnasium in 1976 is a congregation founded by people who had already decided Deerfield was home. By the 1990s those same people were funding sanctuaries and classrooms, and a generation of children was growing up calling Deerfield, not Chicago, the place they were from.
By the time the older Reform congregation B’nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim moved its home north to Deerfield, the town had quietly become a centre of North Shore Jewish life, knit tightly to the Jewish community in neighbouring Highland Park just to the east and Northbrook to the south-west.
The Landmarks
Congregation B’nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim, 1201 Lake Cook Road. BJBE traces its roots to 1893, when B’nai Jehoshua was founded by Bohemian and Czech Jews at 20th and Ashland on Chicago’s near West Side. It later merged with Beth Elohim of Morton Grove, spent years in Glenview, and now anchors Reform life in Deerfield with some 800 member families and a 600-seat sanctuary.
Moriah Congregation, 200 Taub Drive. A Conservative congregation set on a quiet drive off the main roads, Moriah serves families who want traditional worship within walking distance of home. Its presence, alongside the Reform and independent congregations, is what gives Jewish Deerfield its range.
Congregation B’nai Tikvah, Deerfield. Founded by twenty families in 1976 and named Children of Hope, B’nai Tikvah grew from borrowed elementary-school classrooms into its own building by 1993. It is the homegrown congregation, started by Deerfield parents who wanted a Jewish education for their children without driving back to the city.
Rochelle Zell Jewish High School, 1095 Lake Cook Road. Opened in 2001 as the Chicagoland Jewish High School with 26 students, it was renamed in 2015 after a gift from the Zell family. As a pluralistic Jewish high school on Lake Cook Road, it draws families from across the northern suburbs and is a quiet reason many of them choose to live nearby.
Deerfield High School, Township High School District 113. The public high school is consistently ranked among the best in Illinois, and its reputation is one of the strongest magnets pulling families to the village. District 113 has also led the recent public effort to teach the 1959 history rather than bury it.
Shaevitz Kosher Market, 712 Central Avenue, Highland Park. Kosher shopping clusters just over the line in Highland Park, where Shaevitz keeps a kosher butcher and market. For Deerfield’s observant families it is the everyday errand that ties the two towns together more tightly than any map.
Where They Came From
The deepest roots run to Eastern and Central Europe, the Bohemian, Czech, and Russian-Jewish immigrants who landed in Chicago around the turn of the twentieth century and crowded into the West Side. B’nai Jehoshua, the older half of BJBE, was a Bohemian and Czech congregation founded in 1893.
The immediate origin, though, is the city itself. Most Deerfield Jews descend from families who passed through Lawndale and then West Rogers Park before the move north. The suburb is the third or fourth address in a single American journey, not a fresh arrival.
That is why the congregations carry old Chicago names to new suburban buildings. A synagogue that began at 20th and Ashland now sits on Lake Cook Road, and the continuity is the point.
Deerfield Today
Deerfield today is prosperous, well-schooled, and visibly Jewish in a way that would have been unimaginable to its 1959 village board. The synagogues are full on the holidays, the Jewish high school fills its lot, and the line to Highland Park’s kosher shops is short.
It is also a town still small in its Black population, and residents know it. The recent gatherings to reckon publicly with the Progress Development affair, and the choice by District 113 to teach it, are part of how Deerfield now tells its own story rather than hiding from it.
For Jewish families the appeal is plain and unglamorous: good schools, safe streets, a short drive to the city and the lake, and enough congregations that almost any kind of Jew can find a place to daven. That is what a settled community looks like, three or four generations on from Maxwell Street.
The relationship with Highland Park, immediately east, is so close that the two towns function as one Jewish neighbourhood split by a municipal line. The kosher butcher, the delis, and many of the day-school carpools cross that line every day without anyone thinking about it. Deerfield supplies the schools and the synagogues; Highland Park supplies the shops; and the families move between them as if it were a single town.
What the Jews in Deerfield have made, in the end, is an ordinary American suburb that happens to be deeply Jewish. There is no historic district, no immigrant tenement to point to. The story is written instead in the membership rolls of three or four congregations, in a Jewish high school on Lake Cook Road, and in the quiet fact that a village which once went to the Supreme Court to stay homogeneous now counts thousands of Jewish residents among its own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Deerfield, Illinois a Jewish town?
Deerfield has a large and well-established Jewish population, part of the broader concentration of Jews on Chicago’s North Shore. Several synagogues and a Jewish high school serve the community, and Jewish families have been moving here in significant numbers since the early 1980s.
How did the Jewish community in Deerfield begin?
The Jews in Deerfield are largely descended from Chicago families who moved out of the West Side and West Rogers Park to the northern suburbs from the 1960s onward. Congregations and a homegrown synagogue, B’nai Tikvah, were founded as the families arrived.
What synagogues are in Deerfield?
Deerfield is home to Congregation B’nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim (Reform) at 1201 Lake Cook Road, Moriah Congregation (Conservative) at 200 Taub Drive, and Congregation B’nai Tikvah, founded by local families in 1976.
What was the 1959 Deerfield housing controversy?
In 1959 the village blocked an integrated housing development planned by Progress Development Corporation, condemning the land for parks instead after a referendum. The episode drew national attention and the label the Little Rock of the North.
Where do Deerfield’s Jewish families come from?
Most trace their roots to Eastern and Central European immigrants who settled on Chicago’s West Side around 1900, then moved through West Rogers Park before reaching the suburbs. The Jews in Deerfield are typically a third or fourth generation in the same family journey.
Is there a Jewish high school in Deerfield?
Yes. Rochelle Zell Jewish High School at 1095 Lake Cook Road opened in 2001 as the Chicagoland Jewish High School and was renamed in 2015. It is a pluralistic Jewish high school serving families across Chicago’s northern suburbs.
If your family’s story passed through Deerfield, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the West Side of Chicago and the shops of Devon Avenue, to a synagogue on Lake Cook Road, to wherever you are now.