Hanna Shina Honored at the Chaldean Cultural Center Founders Gala

On October 20, 2023, at the Chaldean Cultural Center’s 20th Anniversary Founders Gala at Shenandoah Country Club in West Bloomfield, Michigan, eight founders were honored with plaques. Hanna Shina was one of them, recognized for his role as a founder and founding board member of the first and only Chaldean museum in the world.

The founders recognized that evening were Rosemary Antone (who died in 2009), Virjean Arabo, Francis Boji, Raad Kathawa, Mary Romaya, Josephine Sarafa, Victor Saroki and Hanna Shina — the group whose work carried the Center from an idea to an institution.

The Chaldean Cultural Center was conceived in 2003 at Southfield Manor. Shenandoah Country Club was acquired by the Chaldean Iraqi American Association of Michigan and renovated to house museum space. Construction began in 2013, and the museum opened in 2017 at 5600 Walnut Lake Road in West Bloomfield. The gala marked twenty years from the first conversation to a museum with galleries the community’s children can walk through.

Hanna Shina appears inside the museum as well as on its founding board: a hologram in the Chaldean Village Life gallery portrays him as a grandfather teaching his grandson to use a slingshot. In the oral history film the Center published two months before the gala, he described what the museum is for.

“The cultural center is for the children of our Chaldean community, especially those who were born and raised here, to see how our life was before in our mother country.”

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More background: Shenandoah Country Club and the Mayor of Shenandoah honor, Hanna Shina and the Chaldean Cultural Center, and the biography of Hanna Shina.

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