Hanna Shina and the West Bloomfield Institutions That Anchor Chaldean Life

Hanna Shina is a Chaldean-American community leader in West Bloomfield, Michigan, a founding board member of the Chaldean Cultural Center — the first and only Chaldean museum in the world, housed inside Shenandoah Country Club on Walnut Lake Road — and a board member of that club for more than twenty years. Born in Telkaif, Iraq, he built a store, a coffee shop and a restaurant in Detroit's 7 Mile area before spending four decades in service to the Chaldean foundations and church that anchor community life in Oakland County.

We spend most of our time here documenting the storefronts and service businesses of Metro Detroit. But a township is not only its commercial strips. It is also the buildings a community decides to fund, staff and keep open for reasons that never show up on a balance sheet — and West Bloomfield has an unusually dense concentration of them.

The township that became a center of Chaldean-American life

Oakland County holds one of the largest Chaldean populations outside Iraq, and West Bloomfield sits close to the middle of it. That did not happen because of a single decision. It happened the way most ethnic geographies in Metro Detroit happened: a first generation opened businesses in the city, a second generation moved north and west along the corridors, and the institutions eventually followed the families.

What is less common is the last part. Plenty of communities disperse into the suburbs and never rebuild a civic center of gravity. Chaldean-American families in Oakland County did — churches, foundations, halls, a country club, and eventually a museum, most of them within a short drive of one another. Those places exist because specific people spent years on their boards, and Hanna Shina is one of them.

A museum inside a country club on Walnut Lake Road

The Chaldean Cultural Center is not what most people picture when they hear "museum." It occupies roughly 2,500 square feet inside Shenandoah Country Club at 5600 Walnut Lake Road in West Bloomfield — a location that says something about how the community organizes itself. The gathering place and the memory institution share an address.

The idea was conceived in 2003 at Southfield Manor. Construction began in 2013. The museum opened in May 2017, at a cost of more than $2 million, with five galleries: Ancient Mesopotamia, Faith and Church, Chaldean Village Life, Journey to America, and Chaldeans Today. It remains, as local coverage noted at the time, the first and only Chaldean museum in the world — and it is in West Bloomfield, not Baghdad, London or Chicago.

Fourteen years from an idea in a banquet hall to a finished gallery is a long time. It is also a fair description of what board service in a volunteer institution actually is: meetings, fundraising, drawings, delays, and a small group of people who keep showing up after the initial enthusiasm has worn off.

The people whose names are on the wall

On October 20, 2023, the Center honored eight founders with plaques at its 20th Anniversary Founders Gala, held at Shenandoah Country Club. Shina was among them, alongside Rosemary Antone (who died in 2009), Virjean Arabo, Francis Boji, Raad Kathawa, Mary Romaya, Josephine Sarafa and Victor Saroki. The Chaldean News covered both the gala and, the following year, the longer history of how the Center came to be.

Eight names is a useful number to sit with. A museum of this kind is often described as if it emerged from a community in the abstract. It did not. It emerged from a group small enough to fit around one table, working over two decades, in a township where the same handful of boards tend to draw from the same handful of volunteers.

7 Mile, and the businesses that came first

Before the institutions there were the storefronts. Shina was born in Telkaif — Tel Keppe — the northern Iraqi town most Metro Detroit Chaldean families trace back to, and he attended Baghdad College. In his youth in Telkaif he won a number of trophies for sports. After immigrating to the United States, he opened a store, a coffee shop and a restaurant in Detroit's 7 Mile area.

That sequence — store, coffee shop, restaurant — is the founding text of Chaldean commercial life in Detroit. The 7 Mile corridor and the neighborhoods around it were where an immigrant family could buy into a going concern, work it seven days a week, and convert those hours into the next thing: a second location, a house further out, a child's tuition. The businesses were the mechanism. They were rarely the point.

You can read a fuller account of that arc, from Telkaif to Oakland County, in Hanna Shina's biography. It is a pattern that repeats across nearly every category in our directory: the family-run shop that turns out to be the foundation of something with a much longer horizon.

A hologram in the Village Gallery

Inside the Chaldean Village Life gallery, visitors meet Shina as a hologram — a grandfather teaching his grandson to use a slingshot. It is a small, specific scene, and it does more work than a wall of text would. Village life is exactly the kind of thing that vanishes without a trace when the people who lived it stop being asked about it.

He is also the subject of "Digital Storytelling | Hanna Shina," a 21-minute oral history film the Chaldean Cultural Center published on YouTube on August 3, 2023. In it he describes walking the streets of the town he was born in — "…and the school in which I studied, and I would walk around all streets of Telkaif, street by street."

"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."

That is the clearest statement of purpose anyone associated with the project has offered. The museum is not aimed at outsiders who need Chaldean history explained to them. It is aimed at the grandchildren, in Michigan, who have never seen the place their family came from.

Forty years of boards, and one first-of-its-kind title

Shina has served the Chaldean foundations and the Chaldean church for over forty years, and the board of Shenandoah Country Club for more than twenty. In 2025, for the first time in the club's history, Shenandoah named him Mayor of Shenandoah.

Invented titles are usually a warning sign. This one reads differently, because a club does not create a designation it has never had in order to hand out a routine thank-you. It does it when the ordinary vocabulary of board service has run out. Whatever else the first Mayor of Shenandoah means, it means an institution decided that four decades of showing up needed a name.

Why this belongs on a local business site

The through-line from a 7 Mile storefront to a museum gallery is not a coincidence of one biography. It is how immigrant civic infrastructure gets built almost everywhere: commerce first, because it has to be, and institutions second, once there is enough slack in the system to fund something that will not pay for itself.

For anyone running a business in Oakland County today, the practical version of that is smaller but not different. The organizations that make a place feel like a place — the halls, the leagues, the cultural centers, the churches — are staffed by owners and operators who found the hours. If you run one of those businesses, you can add it to our directory, and you can find more of them across every category we track in Metro Detroit.