Title: A Life Renewed
By: Gila Arnold
Israel Bookshop Publications
199 pages
There is a famous Hebrew expression “Kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh,” meaning that all Jews are connected to, or responsible for, one another. One way this can be both physically and spiritually achieved is through kidney transplants. We are all given two kidneys but only need one to truly function properly, so one Jew donating a healthy kidney to a fellow Jew in need of one is to me the highest form of chesed that one can perform.
To help achieve this tremendous act of chesed, there is a non-profit Jewish organization called Renewal that helps facilitate this entire process for the Jewish community. They do so by helping kidney donors and recipients navigate all aspects of the transplant process with a host of professional staff, and with their very extensive database they find matches for each one. In fact, Renewal is considered the global pioneer and gold standard for all community-based “altruistic” kidney donations which other communities are now trying to emulate
Renewal recently published a book called A Life Renewed, written by Gila Arnold, which is a collection of amazing inspirational stories about actual Jewish donors and recipients. Arnold interviewed all of them and their stories are fascinating and informative. In addition, the book helps the reader recognize the hashgacha pratis aspect – the tremendous role that Hashem plays in all of these tales. One word of warning: After reading about the heroism of all these donors, most of whom had no prior connection to their recipients, you too may be inspired to want to be a donor as well, which is one of the purposes of this book.
As Arnold explains, Renewal was founded by Mendy Reiner in 2006 by sheer accident. Reiner was a real estate professional with no medical background or connection to this issue. But he had a chance meeting with a total stranger who appeared ill and who approached him while he was waiting to meet his rebbe. Because Reiner appeared to be somewhat sympathetic towards the stranger, the man asked him if he would happen to know someone willing to donate a kidney that he desperately needed. Of course, Reiner had no idea how to find such a person, but he asked a friend of his who worked for Chai Lifeline if he would know how to find a kidney donor, and they both realized that, to their knowledge, no such organization existed, at least not in the Jewish world. And this is how Reiner then took it upon himself to launch such an organization, believing that this individual did not just choose him at random but that Hashem selected him for this to be his “calling” in life.
Due to his amazing efforts, Renewal has grown tremendously since then: Between 2006 and 2025, there have been nearly 1,400 kidney transplants done through Renewal, and the organization is currently responsible for 18 percent of all “altruistic” kidney donations (in which the living donor has no prior contact or knowledge of the recipient, but donates a kidney purely to save the life of a fellow human being). In fact, Renewal is recognized as the leading organization for all altruistic kidney donations in the United States, surpassing all other kidney organizations and all non-Jewish communities in this endeavor. In addition, most other kidney registers only include kidneys from deceased donors, very few from living donors; Renewal, uniquely, works only with living donors. Deceased donors have a much lower transplant success rate than living donors. In fact, Renewal conducts such an extensive interview and testing process to help ensure that each respective kidney donor and recipient will be a perfect match that their current post-transplant rejection rate is only about five percent.
There are so many memorable stories in the book. The following is a sample of three of them. The first story concerns a young single male who lived next door to a kidney dialysis center. After observing all the patients continually going in and out almost every day with such pained expressions, he realized just how painful and taxing the entire process was, which inspired him to want to donate his kidney to help rescue someone from such a long, torturous ordeal. When he subsequently was married and had the courage to bring up his desire to be a kidney donor to his new wife, he was glad to find that she was very receptive to the idea, and in fact, she was considering donating a kidney as well because she had a 64-year-old great-aunt who also suffered from kidney disease. Well, fate would have it that the recipient whom Renewal matched him to was in fact a 64-year-old woman, and sure enough when they both walked in to the hospital almost at the same time for the transplant surgery, his match was in fact her great-aunt! She was overjoyed to see who her donor was. This certainly helped to bring both their families together.
Another interesting story called “Finding the Perfect Match” is about a young man who had had several kidney transplants that failed and was experiencing great difficulty finding another match due to his many antibodies. He then read a book regarding the power of making berachos and especially by saying the word Amen. He mentioned this to his mother, who spoke to the women of her shul, and one young girl who became very excited when hearing this offered to help organize an event by inviting all the women of their community to participate. They brought all sorts of different fruits and vegetables, baked goods, and other delicacies that they all made berachos on, which resulted in saying thousands of Amens – all for the sake of helping this young man. Amazingly, soon after this Amen party, the young man got a call from Renewal that – miracle of miracles – they had found a match for him. But the best part was that after he received the kidney and became much healthier and stronger, his mother had the idea of asking the young girl who had organized this Amen party for him if she would be willing to date him, and sure enough several months later they were married. So, he received a perfectly matched kidney that saved his life, as well as a perfectly matched wife who helped bring it about. And to show their hakaras hatov to Hashem, they made many more Amen parties after that for anyone needing a beracha or refuah in their life.
Finally, the last story in the book, which to me was the most poignant of all, spans many generations, beginning during the Shoah and ending in recent times in New York. It is about a young woman who was waiting in line to be deported from a Jewish ghetto in Poland in 1942 and sent to a concentration camp. To her amazement, when she gave her name and place of birth, which was Czechoslovakia, to the Gestapo in charge, she was told that because she was not born in Poland, she would not be deported with the rest of the Polish Jews there, and in addition, no longer needed to remain in the ghetto. But she would have to come back the next day with her birth certificate to prove that she was not born in Poland. She then mentioned that all her family were also not born in Poland (which was not true), and they too would need to show their birth certificates to prove that as well. Fortunately, both she and her mother were great artists and knew how to forge birth certificates, so to help save all her extended family, she and her mother were up all night creating fake birth certificates for their entire family. In addition, they were very close to the Bobover Rebbe who also lived in the ghetto, and they created forged birth certificates for his entire family as well. These false birth certificates actually saved both her entire family as well as the Bobover Rebbe’s – and they eventually all ended up in America.
Fast forward many years. The daughter-in-law of this young woman was in need of a kidney transplant, and as it turned out that the donor of her kidney, matched by Renewal, as she later discovered when meeting with him, was the great-grandson of the Bobover Rebbe. So, his donating a kidney to the daughter-in-law of this Czech girl who had helped save the lives of his great-grandfather, the Bobover Rebbe, and his entire family was actually a way of paying back the favor she had done for them.
Needless to say, their realization of their backgrounds and how Hashem had orchestrated their connection to each other was a highly emotional moment and formed a deep bond between them that was truly indelible. In fact, this was true for so many of the donors and recipients profiled in the book who became lifelong best friends as a result of the kidney connection.
After reading so many of these unbelievable stories, I have come to the conclusion that one reason why Hashem gave us an additional kidney that we don’t really need is to encourage us to donate it to someone else who does need it. This is similar to a very affluent individual sharing his wealth in the form of tzedakah to those who are in need; it is actually his obligation to do so, as Hashem blessed him with wealth mainly in order to share it with others. Donating one’s kidney to another in need involves an even greater degree of self-sacrifice, but with the end result of literally saving a human life. What can be greater than that?
I encourage everyone to read A Life Renewed and be inspired and enlightened by it. And those who are interested in being a kidney donor can contact Renewal by visiting renewal.org or emailing info@renewal.org.