Rabbi says donating kidney was a spiritual obligation
By McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
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Published: October 13, 2009
HACKENSACK, N.J. — Even before Rabbi Ephraim Simon of Teaneck, N.J., gave one of his kidneys to a total stranger from Brooklyn, N.Y., he felt they would be a good match.
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Procedure success
The transplant took about 3½ hours. The procedure involved an incision through Simon’s navel to allow surgeons to insert laparoscopic instruments, cover one of his kidneys in a slippery sack and remove it through the small opening.
"Modern medicine is just phenomenal,” he said. "It’s an amazing procedure.”
Some potential donors are put off by fear of pain or of living life without a spare kidney in case the other goes bad, Simon said. But pain can be controlled by medicine, Simon said. The risks of losing a remaining kidney are "extremely negligible,” and donors "move to the top of the (recipients) list,” if they need a transplant, he said.
A little more than one-third of the 14,000 kidney transplants performed each year in the United States are from live donors, according to federal health data. A live donor is a better source for a kidney than a cadaver.
"There is always some injury (to the organ) involving a deceased donor,” said Dr. Stuart Greenstein, a kidney transplant surgeon at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.
It’s a mitzvah
For Jewish donors, giving a kidney is not only a mitzvah — a good deed performed out of religious duty — but also "an act of kindness and goodness, like charity giving,” Greenstein said.
For Simon and the man who now has one of his kidneys, it was an act of kindness worthy of coverage by Jewish newspapers worldwide. The two sects, among the largest and most prominent ultra-Orthodox groups, have a history of tense relations over Zionism and their views about how much to engage with non-Jews.
The transplant was much better press than the news in July, when a Brooklyn rabbi was arrested for allegedly selling human kidneys. He had told a federal informant that he brought in donors from Israel, buying their organs for $10,000 and selling them to patients in the United States for as much as $160,000.
"It’s incredibly unfortunate that somebody would utilize somebody else’s pain and suffering for their own financial gain,” Simon said.
As part of donor screening, a psychiatrist asked Simon about his motivation. Simon took out a photo of his family.
"I had two motivations,” he said. "One is to save a life, if I can give a father of 10 back to his children, and a husband back to his wife. And, as a rabbi and a father, I wanted to teach children how to sacrifice for others. God didn’t put us here for ourselves, but to make the world a better place and to help other people.”
Simon’s wife, Nechamy, was relieved when the little girl found another donor. But she realized she had to accept that he still wanted to save a life.
"My wife is the real hero,” Simon said. "It was our kidney we were giving away that, God forbid, if one of my children needed, someone else would have to step up.”
Donating a kidney was as awesome as the birth of his nine children, Simon said.
Related Topics:
Culture and Lifestyle, Health and Fitness, Medicine, Religion, Judaism, Organ Transplantation and Donation
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