This year, one of the recipients of the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement—the country’s highest civilian honor—was Rachel Heber, the director of an organization called Matnat Chaim. She founded Matnat Chaim in 2009 with her late husband Yeshayahu in 2009. Michele Chabin explains its mission:
Israel is in the bottom half of countries when it comes to organs harvested after death, the type used in most transplants globally. [But], for more than a decade, the number of Israelis who have donated kidneys while they are still alive and well has increased to the point that Israel is the worldwide leader in live donations per capita.
That’s in large part thanks to the Jerusalem-based nonprofit . . . Matnat Chaim, Hebrew for “gift of life,” which recruits and encourages individuals in good health to donate a kidney for purely altruistic reasons. Of the more than 1,450 live kidney donations Matnat Chaim has facilitated, more than 80 percent were altruistic—donated by individuals who had no connection to the recipient. According to the group’s records, it made at least half of the matches between recipients and live donors in Israel from 2015 to 2022.
Rabbi Yeshayahu Heber, whose life was saved by kidney from a live donor, died from COVID-19 in April 2020. [He] had said he was moved to recruit volunteer donors after watching other kidney patients die for lack of transplants.
About 90 percent of Matnat Chaim’s kidney donors belong to the Modern Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox streams of Judaism.
Read more on Forward: https://forward.com/news/550813/israel-organ-donation-kidney-rabbi-heber-matnat-chaim-altruistic/