PROCESS
Sophia's process
I knew next to nothing about Chicago’s Jewish history when we started this project, so I began my research with the Loyola University library catalogue. This lead me to important books about Chicago’s Jewish past including H. L. Meites’ 1923 History of the Jews of Chicago and Robb Packer’s work on Chicago’s Jewish West Side and older Synagogue buildings. I looked for trends among these books. Which synagogues seemed to best exemplify the experiences of Chicago Jewish communities? Which synagogue structures had compelling histories of reuse? Once I had a list of congregations connected to these questions, I began looking for other sources, mainly congregations’ own accounts of their histories. Then came the hardest part: condensing all these stories into brief paragraphs for the map. I tried to draw on the experience I have writing exhibit labels to convey as much of each congregation’s vibrant history as possible.
Austin's process
To help find information about synagogues and Jewish life in Chicago I utilized several sources. I contacted the Chicago History Museum first to pick the brain of the archivists there and get an idea of any books or resources to access. The first book is called Everyday Heroic Lives: Portraits from Chicago’s Jewish Past. While it was a useful source, especially when it came to Jewish life in Chicago pre-Great Fire of 1871 the book focuses on individuals more than overall trends. To supplement this gap in knowledge I began to comb through the various active synagogues websites to see if they themselves had written about their history and movement throughout their time. Thankfully, this proved to be quite fruitful as many of the synagogues had a record or history page of some sort that told their story through the years. I utilized this knowledge to flesh out the history of the synagogues through the years and created sections of text to accompany said synagogues. Another source I used was History of the Jews of Chicago, which contained information about most of the synagogues in Chicago. More importantly, this book also contained information on synagogues that had closed or merged in the decades before the Internet. So, those two books and the synagogue’s own written histories provided the basis for my research.
I tackled the difficult task of reducing over a century and a half of Chicago’s Jewish history by speaking with individuals at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, where I’ve been working as an intern. Everyone told me the same general story: immigrants arrived on the South Side, moved west, and then headed north. Further, everyone pointed me in the direction of one main source, Irving Cutler’s The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb. This text, referenced heavily across all the additional digital sources I looked at, serves as the definitive history of the Jewish community’s movement throughout Chicago.
I tried, intentionally, to avoid speaking too in-depth about synagogues or religious communities themselves. My colleagues have done an incredible amount of work and written absolutely excellent profiles of the diverse range of different institutions, congregations, and edifices of Jewish religious life. But religious life alone does not a community make! I have tried, to the best of my ability, to fill in some of the gaps about why different groups of people moved to different places throughout Chicago, what they built in those places, and how a disparate collection of immigrant communities became one of the largest Jewish-American populations in the nation.
Davis's process
Much of my process in this project involved investigating the tools available to us for this project, in how we wanted to present our information. We knew that we wanted to create some sort of dynamic map/timeline, and as such, ArcGIS seemed like a perfect fit. It is a great tool for creating extensive and dynamic maps and timelines. However, our first snag when going down this path was discovering that the features we wanted to have wouldn’t be possible; the main reason for this was that while ArcGIS does offer an animated timeline feature, it is only available behind a paywall. Also, even if we had wanted to pay into this and get these extra features, it became apparently that ArcGIS was just too complicated a tool to master in the time we had left. Our main goal with this project was having a complete, professional looking final product, and I feared if we spent too much time trying to figure out ArcGIS and all it’s tools, we would not have enough time to meet our other goals. So we ended up going with StorymapsJS; while Storymaps is very easy to use, it does have it’s limitations. It does not allow for much customization, unless you want to get into the nitty gritty of the source code. Once we had settled on a platform, I created colored icons for each of the synagogues in our list using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator; each synagogue had five different brightness’ to it, with each brighter color indicating the next time period.
While we had originally intended to host our map on Wordpress.com; however, when it came time to actually add the map to the site, I discovered that StoryMapsJS is not supported on Wordpress.com. So we ended up switching over to Wix, which has a great wizzy-wig interface for creating websites.
Eliora's process
FUTURE OF THE PROJECT
​The limitations of tackling such an sweeping topic in the time-frame of a graduate school semester leaves many future "to-do's" for this project. Continued work on this subject should seek to expand the number of featured synagogues, with the hopes of including as many communities from Chicago and the surrounding areas as possible. With the inherent goal of making the concept of migration across the city more visible, it would be wonderful to provide spatial histories for many more synagogues and congregations than we were able to discuss. Additional information through contributions from knowledgeable Jewish residents of Chicago could also expand the scope of this project and we welcome insights, comments, and corrections from the Chicagoland Jewish community. We also look forward to the future collaboration of scholars and academics in this effort to map - fully and completely - the storied history of Chicago's Jewish population.