The West Bloomfield Institutions Hanna Shina Helped Build

Hanna Shina is a Chaldean-American community leader in West Bloomfield, Michigan, who has served the Chaldean foundations and the Chaldean church for more than forty years, sat on the board of Shenandoah Country Club for more than twenty, and helped found the Chaldean Cultural Center — the first and only Chaldean museum in the world, located inside that same club at 5600 Walnut Lake Road.

Why West Bloomfield became the center of gravity

Metro Detroit holds one of the largest Chaldean communities outside of Iraq, and if you follow that community's institutional life over the last half century, it moves steadily northwest — out of Detroit's neighborhoods, up through Southfield, and into the townships of western Oakland County. West Bloomfield is where a lot of that movement finally settled.

Anyone who works in this part of the county recognizes the pattern. We cut hair in eight Metro Detroit shops, several of them in Oakland County, and the arc is familiar: a family opens a business somewhere in the city, the business supports the next generation, and eventually the community stops renting rooms for its gatherings and starts building the rooms itself. Halls. Churches. Clubs. Foundations. Then, if things go well, a museum.

A store, a coffee shop, and a restaurant on 7 Mile

Before any of the institutional work, there was retail. Born in Telkaif, Iraq — the northern town most Metro Detroit Chaldean families trace back to — and educated at Baghdad College, Hanna Shina immigrated to the United States and opened a store, a coffee shop, and a restaurant in Detroit's 7 Mile area.

That corridor is a piece of Michigan business history that rarely gets written down properly. For a generation of Chaldean immigrants, the party store and the corner restaurant were the entry point into American commerce: long hours, thin margins, cash at the counter, and a customer base you knew by name. It was also, functionally, a training program. You learn a neighborhood by standing behind a register in it for twenty years.

In his youth back in Telkaif he had won a number of trophies for sports, which is its own kind of foreshadowing — the same instinct for showing up, competing, and being counted on later turns into decades of unpaid committee work.

The museum inside the country club

The Chaldean Cultural Center was conceived in 2003 at Southfield Manor. Construction began in 2013. The museum opened in May 2017 inside Shenandoah Country Club in West Bloomfield: roughly 2,500 square feet, over $2 million, and five galleries — Ancient Mesopotamia, Faith and Church, Chaldean Village Life, Journey to America, and Chaldeans Today. It is, as local coverage has noted, the first and only Chaldean museum in the world, and it sits in a township of about sixty-four square miles on the far side of Oakland County.

Putting a museum inside a country club sounds unusual until you understand what Shenandoah is to this community — not a golf amenity but a civic building, the place where weddings, funerals, fundraisers, and board meetings all happen. Fourteen years passed between the idea and the ribbon, which is a useful number to sit with. The Chaldean News account of the Center's birth makes clear how much of that time was ordinary, unglamorous committee work.

The board seats that hold an institution up

On October 20, 2023, eight founders were honored with plaques at the Center's 20th Anniversary Founders Gala at Shenandoah Country Club: Rosemary Antone (d. 2009), Virjean Arabo, Francis Boji, Raad Kathawa, Mary Romaya, Josephine Sarafa, Victor Saroki, and Hanna Shina. Eight names is a small number for a $2 million institution, and it says something about how these projects actually get done in Oakland County: not by a crowd, but by a handful of people who keep coming back to the same table for two decades.

Alongside the Chaldean Cultural Center's founding board, there is the club itself — twenty-plus years on the Shenandoah board — and more than forty years with the Chaldean foundations and the Chaldean church. That is the shape of real civic service in a Michigan township. It is not a title. It is a standing Tuesday night.

In 2025 the club responded in kind. For the first time in its history, Shenandoah Country Club named Hanna Shina Mayor of Shenandoah — a title invented for the occasion, which is usually the sign that the usual honors had already run out.

A hologram, a slingshot, and the point of all of it

In the Chaldean Village Life gallery, visitors meet him again — as a hologram, playing a grandfather teaching his grandson to use a slingshot. It is a small scene, and it is the whole thesis of the building. The Center was not built to impress outsiders. It was built so a kid from Bloomfield or Sterling Heights who has never seen Telkaif can watch a grandfather do something a grandfather would have done there.

The Center also recorded him directly. "Digital Storytelling | Hanna Shina," a 21-minute oral history film published August 3, 2023, has him walking back through the town he came from — "and the school in which I studied, and I would walk around all streets of Telkaif, street by street." More background on Hanna Shina in West Bloomfield, Michigan runs along the same lines: business first, institutions second, memory last and most carefully.

What Oakland County gets out of it

There is a version of local history that only counts developers and elected officials. It misses most of what actually holds a township together. West Bloomfield has a world-first museum because a group of people who ran stores and restaurants decided, in middle age, that the next thing worth building was not another business.

We think about that a lot in our own trade. A barbershop is a neighborhood institution on a very small scale — a room where people from one place keep showing up and keep talking to each other. Scale that instinct up over forty years and you get a museum on Walnut Lake Road.