Because You Cared
Tag: bone marrow registry
BECAUSE OF YOU!
An Eishel for Avinoam
It happened four years ago, at the end of a routine workday. Avinoam Laufer, 40, was headed homeward in Petach Tikvah. On the way, he felt acute pains in his head. He stopped his car and understood that he was experiencing a stroke. He managed to summon an ambulance and inform his wife before losing consciousness. The doctors explained to the frantic family that there was no choice but to do surgery to insert a drain, so as to stop the bleeding in his brain. Avinoam never woke up from the surgery. For 17 days he lay in a coma. When the doctors established that he was in a state of brain death, his family was called in to part with him.
“Avinoam lived a life for the Jewish people,” his wife describes. The connection with Ezer Mizion was formed yet in his lifetime, through a project he started with a group of friends, in which, every Shabbat, families would host people who were stuck in the Schneider and Beilinson Hospitals on Shabbat, providing them with sleeping accommodations and meals. In time, the project was named for him: “Eshel Avinoam.” Eishel refers to the tree near the home of Avrohom Avinu (the Jewish forefather) who planted the tree for the benefit of his many guests. The Hebrew word “eshel” – comprised of the letters aleph-shin-lamed — stands for achilah (food), shtiyah (drink), and linah (sleeping accommodations)which were provided both by the tree and in his tent. Using the same initials, the word also stands for Avinoam Shalom Laufer.
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Because of You!
Our Heroes
Because of You!
Connecting the Dots
Remember doing Connect the Dots when you were a kid? If you did it correctly, you were rewarded with a picture. As adults, we sometimes are also called on to connect the dots but the reward is so much greater. Sometime it can be saving a life!
- Here we are at #1, the starting point: a hospital in Israel. We have a cancer patient whose only chance to survive is a stem cell transplant. He needs stem cells from a donor whose DNA matches his. Very hard to find but we think we have one. We just have to do some further testing. Problem. The lab is in Petach Tikvah, Israel. The donor is in Germany. Give up? Of course not! With caring contacts everywhere, Ezer Mizion began to ‘follow the numbers’.
- 2. We asked Yossi Beinhacker, VP of the Rabbinical Center of Europe if he has any contact in Germany who would be willing to help.
- 3. Lord Shmuel Aharon Brodman, rabbi of a community in Munich was his choice
- 4. Lord Shmuel Aharon Brodman put us in touch with Dr. Brown who was happy to draw blood
- 5. Ezer Mizion immense Linked to Life (a whatsapp network) was alerted to find a volunteer to take the test tubes from Germany to Israel
- 6. Gadi Cohen answered the call. He will be traveling from Germany to Tel Aviv and will be thrilled to take the test tubes with him but he will not be anywhere near Petach Tikva where they are needed.
- 7. Second volunteer will be traveling from Tel Aviv to Petach Tikvah. Picture completed! Another Ezer Mizion success story.
More than one life per day is saved by the Ezer Mizion Bone Marrow Registry. Many of these are young parents battling cancer who had been terrified at leaving their children to grow up as orphans. Others are small children who will now mature and raise families of their own. Genetic testing is expensive and it is your generosity that has enabled Ezer Mizion to facilitate stem cell transplants, thus saving so many lives around the globe.
The Kinches Family Command Center
It’s called ‘making a difference’. Making a difference in the lives of courageous people who are faced with life’s crises. And sometimes it is making a difference by actually saving lives.
A long-time Queens resident together with his family have truly made a difference in the lives of so many with their recent donation of a Command Center- an office on wheels- to Ezer Mizion. Dedicated by Allan Kinches, Reuvaine and Joyce Kinches and Elliott and Nicole Kinches in loving memory of Marilyn Kinches, Morris and Ann Kinches, Norman and Geraldine Katz, Norman Kinches, the Command Center has already begun helping Jews worldwide.
The new Command Center had made its debut on Lag B’Omer. The logistics in coordinating the myriad of details involved in facilitating transports for the elderly, the disabled and the ill by Ezer Mizion’s Ambulance Service are complex indeed. The Kinches Command Center trailer played a major role in facilitating ambulance transport for mobility impaired people up and down the mountain. It has a full IT setup, with computerized map displays of the entire Meron area. The trailer has its own AC and generator and was set up with its own land-line phone system for coordinating the trips to and from the ziyon of Rabbi Shimon and the entire team. (Land-lines are used for greater reliability. Last year the cell phones at Meron all crashed, and Ezer Mizion was the only communication source, via land lines. Ezer Mizion land-lines were then shared with Hatzalah for their vital work.)
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Absolutely Not!
“Absolutely not!” he said. Again and again. Each time the subject was brought up. “No! A thousand percent NO, NO, NO!”
That’s my son. Stubborn as they come. I can’t say I blame him. After all, he’s a teenager and just wants to be like everyone else. He went through a lot, that son of mine. For a while it was touch and go and, at his age, there was no way to hide the situation from him. That’s a pretty scary package for a young boy of eleven to handle. Now he just wanted to be normal. Like his friends. He didn’t want anyone to google his name and suddenly be confronted with a bald replica of his younger self. He wanted to erase that nightmare from his history. Click ‘delete’ and it never happened. A meeting with his donor? Absolutely not! And there’d be cameras. He’d make it on the internet. There for everyone to see. There for him to see. A massive to-do in technicolor, highlighting what he would only want to expunge from his psyche. And so the answer was NO!
A stem cell transplant had been his last chance to survive and, for a long time, there was no matching donor on the horizon. It was only through Ezer Mizion that a DNA match was finally found. As parents, we wanted the opportunity to say thank you to this amazing person who gave his all to help someone he didn’t even know.
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BECAUSE OF YOU!
