CHICAGO (WLS) — Happening from October 5 to 26, the 2025 Chicago Sukkah Design Festival will be set in North Lawndale at James Stone Freedom Square. This event unites neighbors, community organizations, designers, artists, students, and religious leaders to collaboratively create sukkahs—structures rooted in Jewish tradition—reimagined as symbols of belonging, unity, and optimism.
The festival is entrenched in North Lawndale’s intertwined Black and Jewish heritage and strong history of resilience, promoting interfaith, multicultural, and multiracial cooperation.
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Participants come together to construct “third spaces”—areas fostering community interaction, creativity, and the visualizing of equitable futures—recognizing our shared humanity and interconnectedness during a period of global challenges and divisions.
“The Chicago Sukkah Festival honors cultural legacies and strengthens the bond between the Jewish community historically housed in North Lawndale, the mainly Black community residing there now, and the wider Chicago populace,” stated Joseph Altshuler, CSDF artistic director and cofounder of Could Be Design. “Throughout the festival days, the landscape featuring unique sukkah structures will be enlivened with cross-cultural public events, co-organized with the Lawndale Pop-Up Spot, pairing diverse neighborhood groups.”
Once the 20-day festival concludes, each sukkah will be relocated and permanently installed at the community organizations’ facilities that helped design them, serving as dynamic new program areas. For more details, visit https://www.chicagosukkahfestival.org/.
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