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After the end of World War II, Americans across the United States began a mass migration from the urban centers to suburbia. Entire neighborhoods transplanted themselves. The Jewish Community of Metro Detroit: 1945 2005 provides a pictorial history of the Detroit Jewish communitys transition from the city to the suburbs outside of Detroit. For the Jewish communities, life in the Detroit suburbs has been focused on family within a pluralism that embraces the spectrum of experience from the most religiously devout to the ethnically secular. Holidays, bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals have marked the passage of time. Issues of social justice, homeland, and religion have divided and brought people together. The architecture of the structures the Detroit Jewish community has erected, such as Temple Beth El designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, testifies to the communitys presence.
About the author
Barry Stiefel is a doctoral student in the historic preservation program at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he is studying the preservation of historic Jewish sites and Jewish urban history. A native and resident of Ann Arbor, Michigan, for 23 years, Stiefel worked on The Jewish Community of Metro Detroit: 1945-2005 after returning to Ann Arbor from the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in New Orleans. His family's Jewish roots in the Detroit area date to the second decade of the 20th century.
