W hile Rabbi Yeshayahu Heber — the man responsible for saving hundreds of people through his volunteer kidney donor organization — faces prosecution initiated by Health Ministry bureaucrats isn’t there some better way to come to an agreement over what can only be an extreme stretch of the meaning of illegal organ trafficking?
This past Chol Hamoed Succos Rav Chaim Kanievsky who had come to Jerusalem from Bnei Brak on a Shalosh Regalim visit to the Kosel made a detour in his initial itinerary to the home of Rabbi Yeshayahu Heber who has been confined to house arrest. Rabbi Heber is the founder of Matnat Chaim a nonprofit organization that matches voluntary kidney donors with patients on a transplant waiting list independent of certain government protocols (for example donors are allowed to choose their recipients or may specify that the recipient be Jewish).
Rav Chaim’s visit naturally attracted attention but it made waves chiefly because it was essentially an act of public protest against stonehearted individuals in Israel’s criminal justice system who chose to sully the name of a man devoted to saving lives and put him in shackles. Through his organization Rabbi Heber has raised the quality of chesed among the Jewish People lighting the torch of the noblest form of volunteerism and has given the gift of this special mitzvah to donors and recipients alike. Through his agency hundreds of Israelis have donated one of their healthy kidneys to patients barely surviving on dialysis desperately in need of kidney transplants to enable them to continue their lives. Incredibly nearly 500 men and women from all over Israel have donated a kidney in most cases to a complete stranger they met only when they entered the surgical ward for the transplant.
The donors come from all sectors of the population. Most are shomer mitzvos although the desire to perform this act of giving has recently begun to burgeon among nonreligious Israelis as well. It all happens on an entirely volunteer basis stemming only from a strong desire to do a special mitzvah whose only earthly profit is the pleasure of knowing that due to one’s altruism a fellow Jew who stood at death’s door has returned to the land of the living.
