Honoring History: The Birth of the Chaldean Cultural Center

Hanna Shina is named in the Chaldean News article “Honoring History: Birth of the Chaldean Cultural Center” as one of the founding board members of the Chaldean Cultural Center, the first and only Chaldean museum in the world, in West Bloomfield, Michigan. The article, by Cal Abbo and published May 30, 2024, traces the Center from a conversation in the rooms of Southfield Manor around March 2003 to a museum built inside Shenandoah Country Club, and its lead photograph shows Hanna Shina with fellow board members on a special tour given before the museum opened to the public.

Why the Center Exists

The article’s starting point is not a building but a worry. Chaldeans who came to Detroit from northern Iraq watched their children and grandchildren acculturate quickly, and they had few institutions of their own to slow it down. There were no Chaldean schools. Children went to Roman Catholic schools or to public schools, and English became their first language rather than their second. A generation on, many American-born Chaldeans do not speak Sureth, the Aramaic dialect their grandparents grew up in.

That is the pressure the Center was built against. A community can hold on to its faith and its family life and still lose the ordinary texture of its village past — the objects, the trades, the sounds of a language. The founders concluded that memory alone would not carry it, and that what could not be spoken at home would have to be shown in a room. The museum is the answer they arrived at.

Hanna Shina has said the same thing in his own words in the Digital Storytelling oral history film: the Center is for the children of the community, especially those born and raised in the United States, so they can see how life was before in the mother country.

Southfield Manor, 2003

The concept was conceived around March 2003, in the rooms of Southfield Manor — the social club that was then the community’s gathering place. That timing matters to the story the article tells: it is a full two years before Shenandoah Country Club was purchased and opened. The museum was an idea in search of a home long before it had one, and for those two years it existed only as committee work, conversation and intent.

Founding a museum from a standing start is slow work, and the article treats it as such. Between the first conversation and the doors opening in 2017 lies fourteen years of board meetings, fundraising, design decisions and the patient collection of objects and testimony from families who had carried them across an ocean.

Shenandoah and the Two Thousand Square Feet

Shenandoah Country Club in West Bloomfield was purchased by the Chaldean Iraqi American Association of Michigan — CIAAM, the same social organization that ran Southfield Manor. That purchase is what turned the museum from an idea into a plan with an address.

As Shenandoah was renovated, CIAAM designed the club so that the Center would have around 2,000 square feet of space for cultural programming and, eventually, a museum. The decision is a small one on a floor plan and an enormous one in practice: it meant the museum would sit inside the building the community already walked through for weddings, funerals and meetings, rather than waiting somewhere else for visitors to seek it out. More on that building is on the Shenandoah Country Club page.

The Board That Built It

The article’s lead photograph shows Chaldean Cultural Center board members on a special tour of the museum given before it opened to the public. Pictured, left to right:

• Judy Jonna
• Francis Boji
• Hani Mio
• Bishop Ibrahim
• Raad Kathawa
• Bishop Francis
• Mary Romaya
• Hanna Shina — a founding board member of the Center
• Victor Saroki

This is a photo caption, not an honors list. It records who was in the room on the day of that pre-opening tour, and it is a different list from the eight founders honored with plaques at the Center’s 20th Anniversary Founders Gala in October 2023. Both lists are set out side by side on the page about the founders of the Chaldean Cultural Center.

Among those pictured is Mary Romaya, one of the Center’s founders. She was the secretary and a founding board member from the start, and she served as the Center’s executive director for six years until her retirement in 2017 — the year the museum opened its doors.

Hanna Shina’s Part

In this account Hanna Shina appears twice over: as a founding board member of the Chaldean Cultural Center, and inside the museum itself. In the Chaldean Village Life gallery he is portrayed in a hologram as a grandfather teaching his grandson how to use a slingshot — an ordinary afternoon in Telkaif, performed by a man born in Telkaif. The subject of the exhibit and the person explaining it are the same man.

That doubling is the clearest short answer to what founding board service meant here. It was not only committee work. It was people agreeing to be the record as well as to keep it. His own path is set out in the biography of Hanna Shina, and his role at the museum in the page on Hanna Shina and the Chaldean Cultural Center.

Since Then

The Center has since been involved in a move to the Chaldean Community Foundation’s new West Campus — the next chapter of an institution that began as a conversation in a social club in 2003.