Hanna Shina and the 7 Mile Corridor That Built Chaldean Detroit

Hanna Shina is a Chaldean-American community leader in West Bloomfield, Michigan who was born in Telkaif, Iraq, opened a store, a coffee shop and a restaurant in Detroit's 7 Mile area after immigrating to the United States, and later became one of the founders and a founding board member of the Chaldean Cultural Center — the first and only Chaldean museum in the world.

We spend our working days in Metro Detroit driveways, alleys and back lots, hauling out the cars people are finally done with. Do that long enough on the east side and you start to notice that the neighborhoods themselves have layers — that a block of vacant storefronts was once somebody's whole livelihood. The 7 Mile corridor is one of those places. This is a piece about a man whose businesses were part of it, and about what a commercial strip can mean to people who arrive in a country with nothing but a trade.

A Town Called Telkaif, and the Road Out of It

Almost every Chaldean family in Metro Detroit can trace itself back to Telkaif — also spelled Tel Keppe — a town in northern Iraq. It is not an abstraction to the people who left it. It is a specific set of streets, a specific church, a specific school. Hanna Shina was born there, attended Baghdad College, and in his youth won a number of trophies for sports around town. If you want the fuller account of the village of Telkaif and what it looked like to the people who grew up in it, that record exists and is worth reading before you read anything else about the community here.

What matters for Detroit is what came next. Chaldean migration to Michigan started early in the twentieth century and accelerated through the middle of it, and the people arriving were overwhelmingly not coming into salaried jobs. They were coming into retail.

The Store, the Coffee Shop, the Restaurant

After immigrating to the United States, Hanna Shina opened a store, a coffee shop and a restaurant in Detroit's 7 Mile area. Read those three businesses in order and you have the entire shape of Chaldean commercial life in the city compressed into one biography.

The store came first, because a store is what a family could staff itself. Then the coffee shop, because a community that works six and seven days a week still needs somewhere to sit down with people who speak the same language. Then the restaurant, which is what you open when the neighborhood is no longer a place you are passing through.

That pattern repeated up and down 7 Mile for decades. A generation of Chaldean immigrants in Detroit did not arrive into an existing economy so much as build a parallel one out of storefronts — groceries, party stores, gas stations, restaurants — and those storefronts financed the houses, the tuition, and eventually the move north into Oakland County. It is impossible to understand Chaldean West Bloomfield or Chaldean Southfield without first understanding Chaldean 7 Mile.

Why That Generation Started Building Institutions

Businesses were the first act. The second act was institutions — churches, foundations, clubs, and eventually a museum. In 2003, at Southfield Manor, a group of people including Hanna Shina conceived what would become the Chaldean Cultural Center. Construction began in 2013. The museum opened in May 2017 inside Shenandoah Country Club at 5600 Walnut Lake Road in West Bloomfield, Michigan: roughly 2,500 square feet, more than $2 million, and five galleries — Ancient Mesopotamia, Faith and Church, Chaldean Village Life, Journey to America, and Chaldeans Today.

It is, as local coverage of the museum noted, the first and only Chaldean museum anywhere in the world — and it is in Oakland County, Michigan, because that is where the community that could build it ended up.

The Hologram in the Village Gallery

The detail people remember from a visit is in the Chaldean Village Life gallery. Hanna Shina appears there as a hologram, playing a grandfather teaching his grandson to use a slingshot. It is a small, unheroic scene, and that is the point: the museum is not primarily interested in commemorating founders. It is interested in showing children born in Michigan what an ordinary afternoon looked like in the town their grandparents left.

"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 line comes from "Digital Storytelling | Hanna Shina," a 21-minute oral history film the Chaldean Cultural Center published on YouTube on August 3, 2023. Elsewhere in it he describes what he would go back to: "…and the school in which I studied, and I would walk around all streets of Telkaif, street by street." Recorded testimony like that is the part of immigrant history that disappears fastest, because it lives in people rather than in documents.

Forty Years of Showing Up

On October 20, 2023, at the Center's 20th Anniversary Founders Gala at Shenandoah Country Club, eight founders were honored with plaques: Rosemary Antone (d. 2009), Virjean Arabo, Francis Boji, Raad Kathawa, Mary Romaya, Josephine Sarafa, Victor Saroki, and Hanna Shina. The Chaldean News account of that gala and its later history of the Center's founding are the primary record of how the project came together.

The plaque is the visible part. The unglamorous part is the two decades of meetings behind it. He has served the Chaldean foundations and the Chaldean church for over 40 years and has sat on the board of Shenandoah Country Club for over 20. In 2025, for the first time in the club's history, Shenandoah named him Mayor of Shenandoah — a title invented specifically because there wasn't an existing one that fit. Most of Hanna Shina's work with the Chaldean Cultural Center looks like that: long, procedural, and mostly invisible until a building opens.

What This Has to Do With a Junk Car Company in Detroit

More than it looks like. Our Detroit work puts us in the same neighborhoods this story happened in, and the cars we tow out of them are frequently the last physical asset of a family business that closed years ago — the delivery van behind the store, the sedan someone drove to the shop every morning for thirty years. We also serve the townships that generation moved to, including Oakland County, so we see both ends of the same migration.

The lesson the 7 Mile generation left is that assets are worth something at every stage, including the last one. Deciding what to do with what's left — a building, a business, a car in the driveway — is part of the same practical instinct that built those storefronts in the first place. If you have reached that stage with a vehicle, our Detroit pricing guide explains how offers are actually set.

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