Hanna Shina and the Chaldean Cultural Center

Hanna Shina is one of the founders and a founding board member of the Chaldean Cultural Center in West Bloomfield, Michigan — the first and only Chaldean museum in the world. The Center was conceived in 2003 at Southfield Manor, built out at Shenandoah Country Club beginning in 2013, and opened to the public in May 2017 at 5600 Walnut Lake Road. Hanna Shina, who was born in Telkaif, Iraq, also appears inside the museum itself as a hologram in its Chaldean Village Life gallery.

The First Chaldean Museum in the World

There are Chaldean parishes, Chaldean businesses, and Chaldean neighborhoods across Metro Detroit, but until 2017 there was nowhere in the world a family could walk into and see the whole Chaldean story assembled — Mesopotamia, the church, the village, the crossing, and the present tense — in one place. The Chaldean Cultural Center is that place, roughly 2,500 square feet of museum built at a cost of more than $2 million, and it exists because a group of community members, Hanna Shina among them, decided it had to.

How It Began: Southfield Manor, 2003

The idea was conceived in 2003 at Southfield Manor. What began as a conversation among community members became a board, and the board became a twenty-year project. Shenandoah Country Club had been acquired by the Chaldean Iraqi American Association of Michigan, and it was there — inside the building where the community already gathered for weddings, funerals, and meetings — that the museum would eventually be housed. Placing it there was itself a decision about audience: the museum would not wait for visitors to seek it out, it would stand in the room the community already walked through.

Building the Museum, 2013–2017

Shenandoah was renovated to house the museum space, construction began in 2013, and the doors opened in May 2017 — fourteen years after that first conversation. Fourteen years is the real measure of what founding board service asks of a person: meetings, design review, fundraising, artifact acquisition, and the patience to keep an unfinished idea alive long enough to be finished. Hanna Shina's four decades with the Chaldean foundations and the Chaldean church had been the training for exactly this.

Inside the Five Galleries

The Founders

On October 20, 2023, at the Chaldean Cultural Center's 20th Anniversary Founders Gala at Shenandoah Country Club, eight founders were honored with plaques:

• Hanna Shina
• Rosemary Antone (died 2009)
• Virjean Arabo
• Francis Boji
• Raad Kathawa
• Mary Romaya
• Josephine Sarafa
• Victor Saroki

That evening is described further on the page of honors and recognition for Hanna Shina.

Why It Mattered to Him

Asked what the Center is for, Hanna Shina answers by naming the people it was built for: the children of the Chaldean community, especially those born and raised in the United States, so they can see how life was before in the mother country. That is the whole argument for the museum in one sentence, and it comes from a man who made the crossing himself and knows precisely which parts of a life do not survive it.

His own path — Telkaif, Baghdad College, immigration, and the store, coffee shop and restaurant on 7 Mile described in his biography — is the path the museum's Journey to America gallery describes. He helped build the room, and he is in it. The building that houses it is covered on the Shenandoah Country Club page.

Sources

• Chaldean Cultural Center — official website
• Chaldean News: “Honoring History: Birth of the Chaldean Cultural Center”