It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

If you look closely at dozens of old buildings across Chicago, you'll find symbols of Judaism.

Stars of David or Hebrew letters etched into the walls.

But these buildings aren't Jewish institutions, at least not anymore. I'm WB.E.Z producer Jason

Mark. On this edition of Curious City, we're answering a question we got from Elias Salts about the

history of Chicago's Jewish community.

He wants to know, where were the largest Jewish neighborhoods, what were they like, and where did

they go? The answer, it turns out, tells a story about the struggle between assimilation and

maintaining traditions, how economic power changes a community, and what it means to overcome

discrimination. The first Jews came to Chicago from Germany soon after the city was founded in the

1830s. But the largest group of Jews came from Eastern Europe in the 1880s, and that's where this story

begins.

Now, we can't give you the whole brisket, so we're going to break this down into a matzabal-sized package, following the typical migration pattern of the Eastern European Jewish

community through the lens of a single synagogue. That synagogue is Kahilath Israel

Nusakh-Safarred, or Kins. The Kins congregation moved three different times, mirroring the way the

community at large moved across the city. To find out why, I hook up with the man known as the

Dean of Jewish Chicago Research. My name is Irving Cutler.

I'm a retired professor of urban geography and the author of a number of books on the Jews of

Chicago.

And I've given a lot of bus and boat tours of the area.

Cutler's being modest. The 95-year-old has written the

definitive books on the Jews of Chicago is a founder of the Jewish Historical Society and has

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