The Chair Sukkah in Rav Unterman's Old Shul
In an English shul that resists change because 'Rav Unterman didn't do it,' Rabbi Rothberg builds sukkah walls of stacked chairs, and learns who did it first.
Rabbi Rothberg and his chaverim went to a city in England to revitalize the state of Yiddishkeit there. They constantly encountered opposition to halachic changes they wanted to enact which they thought were required. One oft-repeated reply was “Rav Unterman didn’t do it, and if it was good enough for Rav Unterman, it’s good enough for me.”
Rav Unterman had been the chief rabbi of Liverpool until 1946, but he hadn’t been there for many years and there was no way of ascertaining what Rav Unterman really did. After Yom Kippur, they asked the 75-year-old gabbai if the shul had a sukkah. He replied, “Sure!”
The night before Sukkos, they asked him to show them the sukkah. He took them to a room in the shul and pulled a lever, and some boards in the center of the ceiling opened up to reveal the sky. “Just put some s’chach up!” he said. They realized right away that it was invalid. The walls of the room were too far away from the opening in the center of the room to be kosher sukkah walls.