They came north on the trains and the new expressways, leaving behind the brick two-flats of Chicago’s West Side for a flat stretch of former onion fields. By the mid-1960s, if you walked down Dempster Street in Skokie, Illinois, you passed kosher butchers and Hebrew schools, a bakery where the woman slicing your rye had a number tattooed on her forearm. Nearly six in ten residents of this single Cook County village were Jewish. And within that community lived one of the largest concentrations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the United States.
Skokie: The Place
Skokie sits about 15 miles north of the Loop, just over the Chicago city line, hemmed by Evanston to the east and Lincolnwood to the south. Its name comes from a Potawatomi word for marsh, and the land really was marshland and farm fields before the postwar building boom.
The Edens Expressway, opened in 1951, cut along its western edge and made the village an easy drive from the city. What rose along its grid of streets were modest single-family ranch and brick houses, the kind a young family could afford on one income. It was a quiet, residential suburb built almost overnight.
How Skokie Became Jewish
Before the Move North
Skokie was incorporated in 1888 as Niles Centre, a farming village settled largely by German and Luxembourger immigrants. For decades it was known for its greenhouses and truck farms supplying Chicago’s markets. It renamed itself Skokie in 1940, hoping to shed a sleepy reputation.
The Jewish story here begins not in Skokie at all, but in the city to the south. For the first half of the twentieth century, the heart of Jewish Chicago was North Lawndale on the West Side.
Russian and Eastern European Jews had filled Lawndale’s streets after 1910, and by 1930 they made up nearly half its population. At its height the greater Lawndale area held roughly 40 percent of all the Jews in Chicago, dense with synagogues, Yiddish theaters, and the bustle of Roosevelt Road.
The Jews Arrive
After World War II that West Side world emptied out fast. Returning veterans wanted lawns and new construction, mortgages came easier, and by the mid-1950s most of Lawndale’s Jewish families were gone.
The migration flowed north in stages: first to Albany Park and Rogers Park inside the city, then over the line into the suburbs. Skokie, with its cheap new houses and its expressway, caught the wave. The arrival of a Jewish institution sealed it.
In 1957 the Niles Township Jewish Community Center opened in Skokie, the first suburban JCC in the Chicago area. Synagogues followed quickly. Skokie Valley Agudath Jacob, an Orthodox congregation, had already been founded in 1956, and it would grow into the largest Orthodox congregation in the Chicago region.
Woven into this ordinary suburban migration was something extraordinary. An estimated 8,000 Holocaust survivors settled in Skokie across the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. They came from the displaced-persons camps of postwar Europe, from Poland and Hungary and the towns the Nazis had erased, and they rebuilt their lives one bungalow at a time.
Skokie at Its Peak
By the mid-1960s, nearly 60 percent of Skokie’s population was Jewish, the largest proportion of any Chicago suburb. In 1975 the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago counted roughly 40,000 Jews among the village’s 70,000 residents.
Daily life carried the texture of the old neighbourhoods, transplanted. Dempster Street became the commercial spine, lined with delis, diners, kosher butchers, Israeli bakeries, and Judaica shops. Yiddish was spoken on the sidewalks and in the bakeries.
Hebrew schools filled in the afternoons. The synagogues spanned every denomination, Reform and Conservative and Orthodox, often within a few blocks of one another. This was a community that had reassembled its institutions whole.
The Confrontation That Defined the Village
In 1977 a small neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Party of America, led by Frank Collin, announced plans to march in Skokie. The group had been holding rallies in Chicago’s Marquette Park, and a Skokie demonstration was a deliberate provocation aimed at a town full of survivors.
The village fought back in court, seeking injunctions and passing ordinances to block the march. The American Civil Liberties Union, with attorney David Goldberger, defended the marchers’ First Amendment right to assemble, a stance that cost the ACLU thousands of members.
The legal fight reached the United States Supreme Court in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie (1977), which required Illinois to provide immediate appellate review of the restraints on the march. The courts ultimately cleared the way for the demonstration to proceed.
And then it never happened in Skokie. Having won the right to march, Collin’s group chose instead to rally in Chicago in the summer of 1978, where they were vastly outnumbered by counter-protesters. The march that gave Skokie its place in legal history was, in the village itself, a march that never came.
The episode did not break the community. It galvanised it. Survivors who had stayed silent for decades began to speak, and they turned their grief into purpose.
In 1981 Skokie residents founded the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, and in 1984 they opened a small storefront museum on Main Street. That modest beginning would grow, three decades later, into one of the most significant Holocaust institutions in the country.
The Landmarks of Jewish Skokie
Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, 9603 Woods Drive. The current building opened on April 19, 2009, with a keynote from former President Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel in attendance. Designed by Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, its facade splits into a dark half holding the entrance and a white half holding the exit, a passage from darkness into light. It grew directly out of the survivor activism that followed the 1977 to 1978 confrontation.
Skokie Valley Agudath Jacob Synagogue, 8825 East Prairie Road. Founded in 1956, it is one of the oldest active synagogues in Skokie and has grown into the largest Orthodox congregation in the Chicago area. It anchored Orthodox life in the village for generations of families who arrived from the city.
Kaufman’s Bagel and Delicatessen, on Dempster Street. Opened by Maury Kaufman, himself a Holocaust survivor, in the early 1960s. For years the great majority of its staff were survivors too, many with concentration-camp numbers on their arms. The deli was sold to the Dworkin family in 1984 and remains a Skokie institution celebrated far beyond Chicago.
Hungarian Kosher Foods, 4020 Oakton Street. Founded by survivor Sandor Kirsche in the early 1970s and moved to a full supermarket in Skokie in 1986, it bills itself as America’s first all-kosher supermarket. Under the slogan “all kosher, only kosher,” it became the largest kosher grocery in the Midwest.
Sam and Hy’s and Barnum and Bagel, Dempster Street. The classic Jewish delis and diners that defined Dempster’s golden years. Like much of that strip, the originals have faded, but they live on in the memory of anyone who grew up ordering corned beef along that street.
Niles Township Jewish Congregation, now Ezra-Habonim. A descendant of the early suburban Conservative congregations that took root as families streamed north in the late 1950s. It reflects how the community’s synagogues have merged and adapted as generations turned over.
Where the Skokie Jews Came From
Most Skokie families traced their roots first to Chicago’s West Side, and before that to the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe: the shtetls and cities of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Hungary. They were the children and grandchildren of the great wave of Jewish emigration that crossed the Atlantic between 1880 and 1920, fleeing pogroms and poverty.
The survivors who arrived after 1945 came from those same lands, but by a far darker road, through the ghettos and camps and then the displaced-persons centers of occupied Europe. Their journeys connect Skokie to the wider story of Jewish settlement across America, from the tenements of the Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the steel-town synagogues of the Jewish community in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh and the West Coast world of the Jews of Fairfax in Los Angeles.
Skokie Today
The numbers have shifted. Skokie is now roughly 28 percent Jewish, down from its mid-1960s peak, and it has become one of the most ethnically diverse suburbs in the country. Large Assyrian, Indian, Korean, and Filipino communities live alongside the Jewish one, and more than a third of residents are foreign-born.
Yet the Jewish presence remains strong and visible. Skokie still has more than a dozen synagogues, an active Orthodox community, a robust Chabad presence, and kosher groceries and bakeries that draw shoppers from across the region. That same diversity that reshaped Skokie echoes other neighbourhoods that turned over gracefully, like the once-Swedish stretch chronicled in the Swedes in Andersonville, Chicago.
And at the village’s northwest edge stands the Illinois Holocaust Museum, drawing students and visitors by the thousands. The survivors who once feared a march down their streets built, instead, a place dedicated to making sure no one forgets. The community that reassembled itself here did not just survive. It left a monument to memory that outlives the generation that raised it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Jews settle in Skokie, Illinois?
After World War II, Jewish families left Chicago’s West Side, especially North Lawndale, in search of new suburban housing. Skokie offered affordable single-family homes and easy access to the city via the Edens Expressway, and the opening of a Jewish community center and synagogues in the late 1950s made it a natural destination. Thousands of Holocaust survivors also settled there in the same decades.
Is Skokie still Jewish today?
Yes, though less so than at its peak. The Jews in Skokie, Illinois once made up nearly 60 percent of the population in the 1960s, and the figure is now around 28 percent. The community remains active, with more than a dozen synagogues, a large Orthodox presence, kosher groceries, and the Illinois Holocaust Museum.
What are the most famous Jewish landmarks in Skokie?
The best known is the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center at 9603 Woods Drive, opened in 2009. Other landmarks include Kaufman’s Bagel and Delicatessen on Dempster Street, Hungarian Kosher Foods on Oakton Street, and the Skokie Valley Agudath Jacob Synagogue, the largest Orthodox congregation in the Chicago area.
Where did the Skokie Jews come from?
Most families came first from Chicago’s West Side, and before that from the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe, including Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Hungary. The Holocaust survivors who settled in Skokie after 1945 came from those same regions by way of Europe’s displaced-persons camps.
What happened with the Nazi march in Skokie?
In 1977 a neo-Nazi group led by Frank Collin announced plans to march in Skokie, leading to the Supreme Court case National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie. The courts upheld the group’s right to march, but it ultimately rallied in Chicago in 1978 and never marched in Skokie itself. The confrontation spurred survivors to found what became the Illinois Holocaust Museum.
If your family’s story passed through Skokie, or through the West Side neighbourhoods and Eastern European towns that fed it, Atlas of Home can help you trace that journey. From the shtetls of Poland and Hungary to Dempster Street, to wherever your family lives now. Explore your story →