New Lake Forest Chabad Center Holds First Rosh Hashana Services

LAKE FOREST, IL — Celebrations of Rosh Hashana begin Friday night, and the start of the Jewish New Year 5784 will also be the first High Holiday service held at the new Chabad Learning Center of Lake Forest.

First announced at a July 7, 2022, memorial in the wake of the Highland Park shooting, the new center was established in March at the Niles Avenue home of Rabbi Moshe Spalter and Sarah Spalter — less than a mile and a half from the spot where the accused gunman was taken into custody.

"The way we combat darkness is by adding light, through adding positivity and light and acts of giving kindness. And that's why [after] the shooting, which brought darkness, we decided the best way was to open a new Chabad center, to start a new Jewish community in Lake Forest," Rabbi Spalter told Patch. "I mean, we obviously realized there was a demand for it here and that was just a push to make it happen."

Moshe Spalter grew up in Costa Rica, where his parents run a Chabad center in San Jose, while Sarah, who grew up in the Chicago area and now works at a Jewish school in Chicago, is the niece of Yosef Schanowitz, the rabbi of North Suburban Lubavitch Chabad at Central Avenue Synagogue.

"Right now we have over 100 Jewish families that we've met here in Lake Forest, something that no one ever imagined existed," he said. "When we were looking into moving here, we met some Jews, and everyone we met was like, 'You know, we're probably the only Jews, maybe there's another five,' then, we're like, 'Interesting, because we've already met 30 or 40 families.'"

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Lake Forest gained more than 1,300 new residents from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, city officials said last fall.

"I'm sure Jews were no exception at that point, I mean, we already met quite a few families who recently moved here, like, in the last couple years or so," the rabbis said. "And times are definitely changing, we've never had any negative incidents here, only positive."

Chabad is an Orthodox Hasidic group that engages in extensive outreach to the wider Jewish community. According to a 2021 report from the Pew Research Center, 5 percent of Jewish adults in the U.S. say they often participate in activities with Chabad, 12 percent said they "sometimes" do, 21 percent said they "rarely" do and 62 percent said they never do.

Since 2001, the number of Chabad centers in Illinois has increased from 21 to 50 as of last year, while the number of other Jewish congregations fell by 57 to just 104 statewide, according to the Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center.

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The Lake Forest Chabad center has not started holding weekly services, but it is part of Spalter's plans for the future.

"We are starting small, because [in] Lake Forest, we're still building a community, so we don't have a permanent synagogue yet. Right now, we're kind of based out of our home and whatever holiday comes up we rearrange an area," he said.

The Spalters invited the entire Lake Forest community to come to a community dinner at 6:45 p.m. on Friday and Rosh Hashana services at 10:30 a.m. Sunday.

"We'd love for everybody to participate," he said. "It's a historic first-ever High Holidays services in the city, so we're really looking forward to that and to celebrate with the community."