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.”