Rabbi Yeshayahu Heber

Adecade ago, Rabbi Heber was a Jerusalem cheder principal and a maggid shiur in the Nesivos Chochmah yeshivah in the Bayit Vegan neighborhood). His entire day revolved around chinuch — he loved learning, teaching, talking to bochurim and helping them work through their issues. But then, at age 45, he experienced renal failure and found himself on the receiving end of a kidney from a friend.

After undergoing a kidney transplant himself, Rabbi Heber saw up close the enormous suffering experienced by dialysis patients swinging back and forth between hope and despair, as opportunities for a transplant seem concrete but then disappear.

During the long hours he spent hooked up to a dialysis machine until a kidney transplant gave him a new lease on life, Rabbi Heber met many other patients suffering from kidney disease, but what pushed him to take action was the case of Pinchas Turgeman, a 19-year-old boy from Kiryat Arba whose condition had deteriorated to a critical level. Rabbi Heber took the initiative to look for a compatible donor and in fact found one, but Pinchas passed away before all the bureaucratic procedures could be completed. With his passing, the Turgemans were left childless — Pinchas’s one older brother had been killed in the course of his army service.

“This shook me to the core,” Rabbi Heber recalled in an interview to Mishpacha in 2018. “His father told me he sacrificed two sons, one on the altar of the Land of Israel and the other on the altar of Israeli bureaucracy.