Rabbi Chanan Unterslak
Giving shiur at Canary Wharf, London
Rabbi & Educator, Aish UK
Alumnus
Kollel Toras Chaim
Biography
Rabbi Chanan Unterslak is an alumnus of Kollel Toras Chaim who today serves as a rabbi and educator at Aish UK in London. Originally from South Africa, he spent years learning in yeshivos across Israel before joining Kollel Toras Chaim under Rabbi Daniel Travis. Those years shaped him - not only in the depth of his learning, but in what he saw modeled every day: a life completely devoted to Torah, tefillah, and quiet acts of chesed.
"To take the Torah he had learned - and give it to others."
That charge set the course for his life's work. Today, alongside his teaching at Aish UK, Rabbi Unterslak develops innovative Torah-learning resources designed to make Torah engaging, memorable, and accessible for the next generation. He lives in London with his wife and children.
Torah Reflection
A few weeks ago, I was standing in Auschwitz.
I was there with Aish, leading a group of 50 young professionals, on a trip that walks you through the largest mass Jewish grave in Eastern Europe. You come face to face with the methods the Nazis engineered to destroy the Jewish body and the Jewish soul. The gas chambers of Belzec. The crematoria of Treblinka. The forests where children were murdered en masse. And then, to end it all, Auschwitz. A factory built for murder.
That day was quiet. Few people. The ground felt desolate and bare, the sky grey, the clouds heavy with rain. You walk through it and you feel the weight settle on you. Depression. Heaviness. Such galus, such pain.
And then, as we made our way toward the exit, a place millions never got to leave, I saw a fox dart across the grounds.
The moment I saw it, my mind went straight to a gemara at the end of Makkos [Makkos 24b]. But before the story, two things worth knowing about foxes.
First: a fox can live almost anywhere. It adapts to the food, the shelter, the habitat of nearly any place on earth. Mountains, deserts, farms, forests. (You will even find foxes living in my neighborhood in London.) In Tanach, foxes are bound up with ruin and desolation, almost synonymous with Churban. Because when people abandon a place and nature reclaims it, the fox is one of the first to move in. It is why you find them in overgrown cemeteries and on old battlefields.
Second: a fox has extraordinary hearing. It can hear a mouse buried deep under the snow. It picks up frequencies we cannot. It lives with access to a whole world we are deaf to.
Now the story. Several of our greatest Sages, Rabbi Akiva among them, are walking when they come upon the ruins of the Beis HaMikdash. Suddenly a fox darts out from the very place where the Holy of Holies once stood. Three of the Sages break down in tears. Rabbi Akiva laughs.
They turn to him: how can you laugh? You are looking at the place that was once the beating heart of Jewish life, our connection to ourselves, to Klal Yisrael, to Hashem. And here is a fox running through it, a living reminder of everything we lost. How can you not cry?
"Three of the greatest Sages wept. Rabbi Akiva laughed."
And here is the thing. Just as the fox hears what no one else can hear, Rabbi Akiva saw what no one else could see.
He saw two prophecies. In the ruins in front of him, he saw one fulfilled, the prophecy of Jerusalem's destruction foretold by the Neviim. But bound up with that very prophecy was a second one, the prophecy of redemption. Because if the words of destruction came true down to the last detail, then the words of redemption would come true too.
The prophecy of redemption promises that after all the Churban, after a land that Mark Twain would later describe as a silent, desolate wilderness, there will once again be old people sitting in the streets of Jerusalem. Old people. Meaning they were not wiped out in the prime of their lives. They grew old there. And it promises something else. Children playing in those same streets.
That prophecy of redemption, today can be found, etched into the walls of the Rova, in the Old City of Jerusalem. And in that same Rova, is a cheder, a boys school of hundreds of children. Every time I have stood there reading those words, the boys have been out on recess. So you are reading a prophecy first spoken over 2,000 years ago while hundreds of little boys shout and run behind you, peyos swaying in the wind. The prophecy is not just words on a wall. It is being fulfilled in real time.
"If every word of destruction came true, so will every word of redemption."
I felt the same thing a few weeks ago in Budapest.
Aish was running another trip, a Shabbaton for year 13 students celebrating the move from one chapter of life to the next. 530 young Jews. We gathered in a shul that miraculously survived the war, a huge building, three stories tall, that for 80 years has stood bare and alone, emptied of the life that once filled it. And this Shabbos, you watched it fill again. Hundreds of Jewish bodies and voices pouring back into that space. From exile to redemption.
But here is what I cannot ignore. Hitler's mission was never only to kill the Jewish body. It was to kill the Jewish soul.
And as beautiful as that Shabbos was, when it ended most of those kids went back to lives that, through no fault of their own, are very far from the Jewish mission. Will they marry Jewish? Will they pass the torch to their own children? For so many, the answer is painfully uncertain.
Rav Noach Weinberg used to say that if you know aleph, teach aleph. The principle is simple and enormous. Knowledge creates responsibility. Every gift, every bracha, every bit of Torah we have been given comes with an obligation to share it. If we were lucky enough to sit in shul on Tisha B'Av and understand what we are mourning, then we carry the responsibility to bring that to the millions of Jews who would give you a blank stare at the words Tisha B'Av. Not because they do not care, but because no one ever showed them what it means.
So that day in Auschwitz, when the heaviness threatened to swallow me, I thought of that gemara, and I felt hope. Because inside the destruction is the promise of redemption. A better day. A better future.
But that hope came with a question. Will I answer the call? Will I take the geula into my own hands and carry the responsibility to share Torah with a nation that is aching for it, whether it knows it or not?
Giving a shiur to young professionals
Rabbi Travis Reflects
"To take the Torah he had learned - and give it to others."