Chicago's oldest Jewish neighborhood embraces change and coexistence

The biggest Jewish neighborhood in Chicago is confronting a challenge that similar communities around the world face: how do you keep a neighborhood's Jewish identity while still trying to welcome newcomers from different religions and ethnic backgrounds?

The Bond Coffee Collective in Chicago's biggest and oldest Jewish neighborhood, West Rogers Park, is doing just that and business is booming. 

It's a coffee shop where you'll see yarmulke, baseball caps, and hijabs. A place where you'll see "co-exist" on a bumper sticker in the parking lot and in practice inside.

"We are not a kosher restaurant. We are a craft coffee and tea shop that happens to be kosher," said Max Dayan, founder of Bond Coffee Collective.

Dayan is one of the new generation of Chicago Jews who figure that rather than resist a changing neighborhood demographic, it makes a lot more sense to embrace it.

"Where we are located in the neighborhood, basically borders four different demographics and everybody speaks to coffee... and that's the convergence right here on the corner."

West Rogers Park was such a strong Jewish enclave in the 1950's and 60's, that its residents had their religious, education, dining, grocery, banking and entertainment options all in walking distance. 

But the neighborhood is seeing a large influx of south Asians residents, who've been spilling over from neighborhoods next door.

Irv Loundy's family has been running Devon Bank since the 1950's, when it was in the heart of the Jewish neighborhood. But today, many Muslim Pakistanis have settled in the community and Loundy does his best to welcome them. 

But Loundy concedes, "each group tends to be in their own corner, there isn't a lot of interaction within the community."

Azi Lifsics is out to change that. He's the new head of the Jewish Neighborhood Development Council of Chicago. And like the Bond Coffee Collective, he feels food could be the economic engine that fuels the future of this shifting neighborhood.

"I would love to see a Kosher- Indian restaurant open," said Lifsics. "To bring the Indian population over and to have an Indian family and a Jewish family sitting next to each other. That would be amazing."

Elfriede Wedam, a sociologist at Loyola University, literally wrote the book on urbanization and religion, and she says the neighborhood's Jewish roots aren't necessarily getting watered down.

"There is a need for a community environment that supports your identity," Wedam said. "But at the same time, we live in a diverse world, in which we need to respect the views and customs and religions of other people, and how can we do that, if we never meet them?"

And, it seems, mochas and muffins might just do the trick.