Highland Park’s median household income was $147,067 in 2020, according to the Census Bureau, more than twice the national median. Some lamenting the tragedy on social media noted how the shooting punctured a very affluent, normally peaceful town where several iconic movies ostensibly about American suburbia - from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to “Sixteen Candles” - were filmed.
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The Lake Shore Country Club opened in 1908 as likely the only of its kind in the area to admit Jews in neighboring Glencoe, but Tcath said it was “primarily populated by Highland Park.” In 1918, the similar Northmoor Country Club opened in Highland Park proper. Highland Park’s Jewish history dates back to the turn of the 20th century, when Tcath said Jewish families began spending parts of their summers in the area. Highland Park is kind of still the Mecca, or Jerusalem, if you will,” Tcath said.
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“While there are other Jewish concentrations elsewhere in the North Shore, Highland Park’s still the original. Thanks to its leading number of Jewish institutions - from camps to synagogues to a kosher butcher and other kosher restaurants - Highland Park is also still a destination for Jews throughout the North Shore, said Jay Tcath, executive vice president of Chicago’s Jewish United Fund.Ī view of the Mizrahi Grill kosher restaurant in Highland Park. (About 3% of the Jews in Highland Park and its surrounding towns are Israeli, the study also found.) A Chicago-area ‘Jerusalem’Īccording to a 2020 study of the metropolitan Chicago area by researchers at Brandeis University and the University of Chicago, Highland Park is 50% Jewish: about 15,000 of the suburb’s 30,000 residents. But Highland Park has the highest Jewish ratio of them all, and it was the original Chicago suburb that grew a substantial Jewish population in the early 20th century.
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The entire North Shore region - which stretches over 20 miles along Lake Michigan, approximately from Evanston up to Lake Bluff - is heavily Jewish, and other adjacent suburbs northwest of Chicago, such as Buffalo Grove and Skokie, are also known for their large Jewish populations. (One of the two victims identified so far, Jacki Sundheim, was the b’nei mitzvah and event coordinator for the North Shore Congregation Israel in the neighboring suburb of Glencoe.) The report captures Highland Park’s sky-high levels of Jewish pride and provides yet another example of how Monday’s shooting that killed at least seven people at a July 4 parade there struck the heart of one of the country’s idyllic suburban Jewish capitals. “In Highland Park,” he told JTA, “they prefer the Israeli flag.”
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The director of a local synagogue said he passed out both American and Israeli flags along the North Shore parade route. Locals were used to seeing a 1953 pickup truck drive through their suburb and others along Chicago’s North Shore blaring a mashup of the song “Yankee Doodle Boy” with a niggun, or wordless melody, written by the noted Orthodox singer-songwriter Shlomo Carlebach. ( JTA ) - In 2014, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency included Highland Park in an article on communities across the country that were melding Jewish pride into their ceremonies for July 4, which that year fell on Friday, just before Shabbat.