On a Friday afternoon in Orland Park, the call to prayer drifts out over a parade of brick subdivisions and four-lane retail strips, and the cars turning into the lot at 104th Avenue carry families whose grandparents once tended olive groves outside Ramallah. The Palestinians in Orland Park did not arrive here first. They came the long way, through Chicago’s Southwest Side, through grocery counters and rented flats, before settling in one of the most comfortable suburbs in Cook County and quietly remaking a piece of it in the image of home.
The Place
Orland Park sits roughly 25 miles southwest of downtown Chicago, a village of broad lawns, golf courses and shopping plazas in the far reaches of Cook County. It was first settled in 1834 as plain “Orland” and incorporated as a village on 31 May 1892, growing from farmland after the Wabash Railroad cut through in 1879.
For most of the twentieth century it was an unremarkable commuter suburb. That changed after the Orland Square Mall opened in 1976 and turned the village into a regional retail anchor.
Today the village is home to roughly 58,700 people, with a median household income near $84,700 and a median family income above $104,000, comfortably above the Illinois average. It is, by any measure, an affluent suburb, and that affluence is precisely what drew the families who now fill the prayer hall on 104th Avenue.
How It Became Palestinian
The Palestinian story in Chicago is older than the suburb that now holds so many of its families. To understand the Palestinians in Orland Park, you have to start downtown, decades before anyone here owned a lawn.
The peddlers and the grocers
The first Palestinians reached Chicago around the time of the 1893 World’s Fair, arriving as peddlers and, before long, as grocery store owners. They opened corner shops across the city’s Black neighbourhoods on the South and West Sides, working long hours behind counters and sending money back to the West Bank villages they had left behind.
That early foothold mattered. It established the trade, the grocery store, that would carry Palestinian families through generations and eventually follow them out to the suburbs.
The waves of displacement
Palestinian migration to Chicago came in surges tied to upheaval at home. The creation of Israel in 1948 displaced more than 700,000 Palestinians and sent a wave toward Chicago. A second wave followed the 1967 war and the military occupation of the West Bank, building through the 1970s.
Migration hit its peak in the 1990s, driven by family reunification and by Palestinians exiled from Kuwait after the Gulf War. By then a dense, self-sustaining community had taken root on the Southwest Side, centred for years on neighbourhoods like Chicago Lawn and Gage Park.
The move to the southwest suburbs
In the 1990s, as families prospered and outgrew their city blocks, many Palestinians began moving southwest out of Chicago proper. They followed Harlem Avenue down through Oak Lawn, Burbank and Bridgeview, and the most successful kept going, out to Tinley Park and Orland Park.
The pattern was classic chain migration in reverse: one family bought a house in a leafy subdivision, relatives followed, and a grocery store or restaurant opened to serve them. The institutions came too. The Mosque Foundation, founded in 1954 by a handful of émigrés from the village of Beitunia, had by then grown into one of the busiest mosques in America, anchored in nearby Bridgeview.
Orland Park became the affluent edge of that migration. It offered space, good schools and quiet streets, the rewards of two or three generations of work, while keeping the community’s religious and commercial heart just a short drive up Harlem Avenue. You could live in Orland Park and still pray, shop and eat among your own.
Building roots in the village
The community did not stay content to commute. In 2004, the Prayer Center of Orland Park opened on 104th Avenue to serve the growing number of Muslim families settling in the far southwest suburbs, many of them Palestinian. It meant Friday prayers no longer required a drive to Bridgeview.
Cook County now holds more Palestinians than any county in the United States. The census counts more than 18,000 in the county and over 23,000 across the metropolitan area, though sociologist Louise Cainkar, who has studied the community for decades, estimates the true figure is closer to 70,000 to 100,000. Orland Park’s share is often given as around 1,350, a number almost everyone agrees undercounts the reality.
The Landmarks
The Prayer Center of Orland Park, 16530 104th Avenue. Built in 2004 as the community pushed further southwest, the mosque serves the Palestinian and broader Muslim families who settled in Orland Park rather than driving to Bridgeview each week. Imam Kifah Mustapha, long a fixture of Chicago’s Islamic life, leads the congregation here. It is the spiritual anchor of the village’s Arab population.
Al Jazeerah Food Market, 15840 Wolf Road. Open since 2021 at the corner of 159th Street and Wolf Road, this Middle Eastern grocery stocks Arabic staples and fresh bread from Hassoon Bakery. It is the kind of shop that lets a family in Orland Park cook the food of Beitunia or Ramallah without leaving the suburb.
Ya Hala Market, Orland Park. A second neighbourhood grocer offering halal meat and household goods, Ya Hala is part of the quiet retail infrastructure that signals a community has truly settled: not one Arab grocery but several, competing for the same Friday shopping run.
Watan Studio, 7710 West 159th Street. Founded in December 2016 by Jumana Al-Qawasmi, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, Watan, Arabic for “homeland”, bills itself as Chicagoland’s only distinctly Palestinian art and design studio. It sells West Bank ceramics, Palestinian olive oil and embroidery, and runs tatreez classes that teach the old stitchwork to a generation born in Illinois.
Al Bawadi Grill, 7216 West 87th Street, Bridgeview. A short drive up Harlem from Orland Park, Al Bawadi opened in 2008 and became the dining room of the southwest suburbs’ Palestinian and Jordanian families. Its mansaf, lamb over rice in fermented yoghurt, and musakhan, sumac chicken on taboon bread, draw weekend crowds from across Chicagoland.
Universal School, Bridgeview. Opened on 4 September 1990 with 165 students, Universal has grown into one of the largest Islamic schools in the Chicago area, serving more than 700 children K through 12. For Orland Park families, it is one of the institutions that made the move to the suburbs feel permanent.
Aqsa School, Bridgeview. An all-girls Islamic day school whose middle and high school divisions opened in 1986 and whose elementary building followed in 1996, Aqsa rounds out the educational network that lets Palestinian families raise children in faith and English at once.
Where They Came From
The Palestinians of greater Chicago come overwhelmingly from a cluster of villages and towns north of Jerusalem, in the Ramallah district of the West Bank. Two places loom largest: Beitunia, a Muslim town, and Ramallah itself, historically Christian. Al-Bireh, Ramallah’s twin city, is heavily represented too.
Other villages appear again and again in family histories here: Turmus Ayya, whose families fill blocks of the southwest suburbs, and El Jib, the biblical Gibeon. Researchers note that certain villages in the Jerusalem and Ramallah area are so concentrated in Chicago that the city functions almost as a second hometown for them.
That concentration is the engine of everything. When one family from Beitunia prospered and bought a house in Orland Park, the next house went to a cousin, then a neighbour from the same village. The geography of the West Bank was, in effect, copied onto the map of Cook County, one extended family at a time.
Orland Park Today
Orland Park today is a suburb living a double life. To one set of eyes it is an ordinary affluent village of malls and golf courses; to another it is the prosperous frontier of one of the largest Palestinian communities in the United States, its families holding professional careers, village memory and American addresses all at once.
The community’s confidence is increasingly public. The stretch of Harlem Avenue running through the southwest suburbs, from roughly 79th Street south, is now widely known as “Little Palestine”, lined with Arabic and English signage for restaurants, bakeries, grocers and law offices. In November 2025 the Illinois House passed a resolution, HJR46, to honour the corridor as “Little Palestine Way”, by a vote of 76 to 33. Political representation has followed: Abdelnasser Rashid became the first Palestinian American elected to the Illinois House.
For all that visibility, the Palestinians in Orland Park remain, in the end, a suburban people doing suburban things: school runs, Friday prayers, weekend grocery trips for the right olive oil. The achievement is precisely how ordinary it looks. A community that arrived as peddlers a century ago now owns the quiet streets, and on Fridays the call to prayer is simply part of the sound of the village.
The same story echoes a few miles north in the Palestinian heart of Bridgeview, and far to the east in the Palestinian enclave of Paterson, New Jersey. Orland Park’s Arab families also share the southwest suburbs with other immigrant communities, from Pakistani families further north in Schaumburg to the long-established Greek communities of Palos Hills and Oak Lawn.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Palestinians live in Orland Park, Illinois?
Estimates put the number of Palestinians in Orland Park at around 1,350, though community members and researchers say the census undercounts the population. Cook County as a whole holds more than 18,000 Palestinians by census figures, and sociologist Louise Cainkar estimates the metro-area total at 70,000 to 100,000.
Why did Palestinians settle in Orland Park?
Palestinians moved to Orland Park in the 1990s and after as families prospered and left Chicago’s Southwest Side for the suburbs. Orland Park offered affordable space, good schools and quiet streets, while keeping the community’s mosques, restaurants and grocers close along the Harlem Avenue corridor.
Where in Palestine do Chicago’s Palestinians come from?
Most trace their roots to the Ramallah district of the West Bank, especially the town of Beitunia and the cities of Ramallah and Al-Bireh. Villages such as Turmus Ayya and El Jib are also heavily represented, and chain migration linked specific villages to the Chicago suburbs.
Is there a mosque for the Palestinian community in Orland Park?
Yes. The Prayer Center of Orland Park, at 16530 104th Avenue, opened in 2004 to serve the growing Muslim and Palestinian population in the far southwest suburbs. The larger Mosque Foundation, founded in 1954 by émigrés from Beitunia, sits nearby in Bridgeview.
What is “Little Palestine” near Orland Park?
“Little Palestine” is the name given to the Harlem Avenue corridor through the southwest suburbs, lined with Palestinian-owned restaurants, bakeries and grocers. In November 2025 the Illinois House passed a resolution to honour the stretch as “Little Palestine Way”.
Where can you eat Palestinian food near Orland Park?
Al Bawadi Grill at 7216 West 87th Street in nearby Bridgeview, open since 2008, is a favourite for mansaf and musakhan. In Orland Park itself, markets such as Al Jazeerah Food Market on Wolf Road sell Palestinian groceries, bread and olive oil for cooking at home.
If your family’s story passed through Orland Park, or any of the places Palestinians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hillside village outside Ramallah to a brick house on the far southwest edge of Cook County, to wherever you are now.