Drive north out of the city on a Friday afternoon and the names on the marquees change. The delis of Devon Avenue give way to the cul-de-sacs of the North Shore, and somewhere around Lake Cook Road you arrive in a village where eight synagogues sit within a few miles of one another. The Jews in Northbrook, Illinois did not arrive all at once. They came in waves, out of the crowded West Side and West Rogers Park, chasing good schools and quiet streets, and they made this leafy Cook County suburb one of the most Jewish places in metropolitan Chicago.
The Place
Northbrook is a village of roughly 35,000 people in northern Cook County, about twenty miles from the Loop, hemmed in by Glenview, Deerfield and Highland Park. It was incorporated in 1901 as Shermerville, a railway settlement named for an early German farming family, and renamed Northbrook in 1923 after residents tired of the old name’s saloon reputation.
For half a century it was farmland and brickyards, a scattering of greenhouses and dairy farms along the rail line. Then the postwar suburban boom arrived, and the population leapt from around 3,300 in 1950 to more than 30,000 by 1980, as detailed in the village’s recorded history.
Today it is consistently ranked among the wealthiest communities in Illinois, with an average household income comfortably above $190,000, top-rated public schools, and a downtown that still feels like a small town pretending it never grew up.
How It Became Jewish
The story of Jewish Northbrook is really the story of a population in motion, climbing steadily northward out of Chicago across three generations.
From the West Side outward
Chicago’s first large Jewish settlement was on the Near West Side, in the immigrant district around Maxwell Street. As families prospered in the early twentieth century, they moved into Lawndale, then Albany Park, then Rogers Park and West Rogers Park, the neighbourhood Chicagoans still call West Ridge.
West Rogers Park boomed as a Jewish district in the 1930s and remained the heart of Jewish Chicago for decades, its strip of Devon Avenue lined with kosher butchers, bakeries and bookshops. But the same upward pressure that had pushed families out of Lawndale kept working. By the mid-1960s, Jewish migration into the northern and north-western suburbs had become unmistakable, a shift well documented in accounts of how West Rogers Park rose, emptied and partly refilled over the same decades.
That outward push was the engine of the whole story. Each neighbourhood the community left behind became the launching point for the next, and the suburbs at the far end of the line, Northbrook among them, were the eventual destination.
The leap to the suburbs
The first leap was to nearby Skokie, the suburb that became a Jewish landmark in its own right, drawing families straight up the line from Albany Park and Rogers Park. The Niles Township Jewish Community Centre opened there in 1957, the first suburban JCC in the area, a clear sign of where the community was heading.
From Skokie the movement continued north and west, into Lincolnwood, then over the county’s quieter edge into Glenview, Northbrook and beyond. The G.I. Bill had put college degrees and mortgages within reach of a generation of Jewish veterans, and the new subdivisions going up across Northbrook’s old farmland were exactly what young families were looking for.
Institutions follow the families
Jewish life in America has always travelled with its institutions, and the pattern held here. In the early 1970s the North Suburban Jewish Community Centre opened in Northbrook, the local expression of a community that had decisively crossed the city line. It survives today as JCC Chicago’s Bernard Weinger campus on Revere Drive.
Synagogues followed, and then schools. Congregations that had begun in city storefronts or rented halls rebuilt themselves around Northbrook’s young families, and a Jewish day school put down roots on Dundee Road. By the close of the twentieth century, Northbrook had quietly become a centre of Conservative, Reform and modern Orthodox life on the North Shore.
A community of congregations
What sets Northbrook apart from many affluent suburbs is the sheer density of Jewish institutions. The village is home to roughly eight synagogues spanning the denominational spectrum, from the large Conservative congregation on Walters Avenue to a modern Orthodox shul on Techny Road and several smaller community synagogues, one of them formed in 2011 from the merger of three older North Shore congregations.
That kind of clustering does not happen by accident. It is what a community looks like once it has fully arrived: not a single landmark street, but a whole town stitched together by where people pray, learn and gather.
It also explains the everyday texture of the place. Mariano’s down the road carved out a kosher section. A Hebrew course found its way onto the high school timetable. An eruv was strung up so observant families could carry on Shabbat. None of these is dramatic on its own, but together they describe a suburb that has organised part of its daily life around a Jewish calendar.
The Landmarks
Congregation Beth Shalom, 3433 Walters Avenue. One of the largest Conservative synagogues on the North Shore, serving more than 950 member families. Egalitarian and welcoming to interfaith families, it anchors the village’s Conservative community and draws members from across the northern suburbs.
Darchei Noam Glenbrook, 3465 Techny Road. A modern Orthodox congregation whose members keep Shabbat and kashrut while remaining fully part of secular professional life. Its presence, alongside an eruv and kosher options nearby, signals how far Orthodox Jewish life has spread north from West Rogers Park.
Sager Solomon Schechter Day School, 3210 Dundee Road. The Northbrook campus of Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago, a National Blue Ribbon school serving children through eighth grade. Its early childhood centre sits down in Skokie, the two campuses tracing the same migration the families made.
JCC Chicago, Bernard Weinger campus, 300 Revere Drive. The descendant of the North Suburban JCC that opened here in the early 1970s. Today it runs preschool, day camp, and programmes for teens, families and seniors, the kind of cradle-to-retirement institution that holds a suburban Jewish community together.
Northbrook Court, 1515 Lake Cook Road. The Neiman Marcus-anchored mall that opened in 1976, just as the village was filling out. For decades it was the commercial and social hub of north-suburban life, the place teenagers met and grandparents window-shopped, even as much of the retail has since thinned out.
Glenbrook North High School, 2300 Shermer Road. The public high school that serves most of Northbrook, perennially among the top-ranked in Illinois and offering Hebrew among its languages. Its exterior stood in for the fictional Shermer High in hometown director John Hughes’s films, including The Breakfast Club.
Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Centre, 9603 Woods Drive, Skokie. A short drive south, the third-largest Holocaust museum in the world. Founded by survivors who settled across these northern suburbs, it remains the moral landmark of the entire region’s Jewish community.
Where They Came From
The families who built Jewish Northbrook were, overwhelmingly, Chicagoans first. Their grandparents and great-grandparents had come from the shtetls and cities of Eastern Europe, from the Russian Empire, Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, arriving through the Maxwell Street port of entry between the 1880s and the 1920s.
What carried them to Northbrook was not a fresh boat from abroad but the slow internal migration of a single community: Lawndale to Albany Park, Albany Park to West Rogers Park, West Rogers Park to Skokie, and Skokie outward to the open suburbs.
By the time they reached Northbrook, the journey had taken three or four generations and never crossed an ocean. It was a distinctly American kind of homecoming, measured in school districts and synagogue parking lots rather than steamship manifests.
Northbrook Today
Northbrook today is comfortable, green and quietly Jewish in a way that no longer needs announcing. The synagogues are full on the high holidays, the day school graduates feed into Glenbrook North, and the JCC’s parking lot fills up for everything from preschool drop-off to senior programmes.
It sits inside a larger constellation of North Shore Jewish suburbs. Just over the line are Highland Park, with its own deep Jewish roots, and neighbouring Deerfield, while families have spread further out to Buffalo Grove and the north-western suburbs. The boundaries between these towns blur at the synagogue and the supermarket.
There are quieter signs of continuity too. Grandparents who once davened in West Rogers Park now watch grandchildren read from the Torah in a Northbrook sanctuary. Families that left Albany Park for a first suburban ranch house have stayed put for fifty years, and their children, having gone away to college, have started coming back to raise their own.
Like much of suburban America, Northbrook faces an ageing housing stock and the slow fade of its enclosed mall. But the institutions the community built have proved durable. A century after the move north began on the West Side, the descendants of Maxwell Street are still here, in a village that was farmland when their great-grandparents stepped off the boat.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Northbrook, Illinois a Jewish community?
Yes. Northbrook is one of the most Jewish suburbs on Chicago’s North Shore, home to roughly eight synagogues, a Jewish day school and a JCC campus. The Jews in Northbrook, Illinois represent a long-established and visible part of the village’s life.
Why did so many Jewish families move to Northbrook?
They moved as part of a decades-long northward migration out of Chicago’s West Side and West Rogers Park, drawn by new postwar subdivisions, excellent public schools and quiet streets. Skokie was the first major suburban stop, and families then spread north into Northbrook and beyond.
What synagogues are in Northbrook?
Northbrook has about eight congregations spanning Conservative, Reform and modern Orthodox Judaism. They include Congregation Beth Shalom on Walters Avenue, the modern Orthodox Darchei Noam Glenbrook on Techny Road, and several community synagogues, one formed in 2011 from the merger of three older congregations.
How did Skokie shape Jewish life in Northbrook?
Skokie was the gateway suburb for Jewish Chicago, drawing families up from Albany Park and Rogers Park beginning in the 1950s. From Skokie the community continued spreading north into Glenview, Northbrook and Deerfield, carrying its synagogues and schools along with it.
Are the schools in Northbrook good for Jewish families?
Northbrook’s public schools are among the best in Illinois, led by top-ranked Glenbrook North High School, which even offers Hebrew. Families seeking a religious education also have the Sager Solomon Schechter Day School on Dundee Road, a National Blue Ribbon Jewish day school.
Where did Northbrook’s Jewish families originally come from?
Most trace their roots to Eastern European immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and the Russian Empire who arrived in Chicago around the Maxwell Street district between the 1880s and 1920s. Their descendants then migrated north through the city’s neighbourhoods before settling in the North Shore suburbs.
If your family’s story passed through Northbrook, 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 Maxwell Street, to the synagogues of Northbrook’s North Shore, to wherever you are now.