This is Curious City editor Alexandra Solomon. As my colleague Jesse Dukes mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the Curious City team has been trying to keep on top of your questions about the coronavirus. And we've been doing things a little differently with the podcast. But this week is Passover, a holiday that many Jewish people here in Chicago and around the world are celebrating right now.

Passover recalls a particular moment in Jewish history, the exodus of the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt to freedom.

So we thought it would be nice to bring you a story about the history of Chicago's Jewish community.

A story from our archive that explores

the tension between assimilation and tradition and what it means to overcome discrimination.

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 size 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 a man known as the

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