https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/to-save-a-strangers-life
Kidney donations are on the rise among Orthodox Israelis
One day more than a decade ago, Rabbi Yeshayahu Heber, an Israeli school principal and yeshiva teacher, suddenly felt too weak to walk up the stairs. He went to his doctor, who sent him to the hospital, where he soon learned that both of his kidneys had stopped working. He began dialysis, a time-consuming and painful process that was brightened only by his roommate, a teenage yeshiva student named Pinchas Turgeman. After about a year on dialysis, Heber received a kidney from a friend. Then, as he recovered, he helped locate a willing donor and match for Turgeman, who had also lost his brother in Israel’s Second Lebanon War in 2006. But Turgeman passed away a few weeks before the scheduled transplant. The loss hit Heber hard.
“I decided I needed to do something,” he recalled, and he thought up the idea of forming an organization to help encourage and facilitate live kidney donation. “So the day that Turgeman died is also the day Matnat Chaim was born.”
