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Ezer Mizion’s Bone Marrow Registry celebrates saving 3100 lives!

Breast cancer survivor Shulamit with IDF member Barak, who was found to be a match for Shulamit through the Ezer Mizion Bone Marrow Registry

Special to The Jewish Post & News

Ezer Mizion is Israel’s largest medical support organization. The crown jewel of the organization is the Ezer Mizion Bone Marrow Registry, the largest Jewish registry in the world with over 950,000 potential bone marrow donors. The size of the registry allows the organization to facilitate over 30 life saving bone marrow transplants every month of the year in Israel, the USA and around the world. In the month of March  alone there were 38 lifesaving transplants!

 

Ezer Mizion has been able to grow the registry because of a landmark agreement and very special relationship with the IDF, a relationship the army does not have with any other organization: Every new army recruit is offered the option to be swabbed at the Ezer Mizion clinic at the Bakum induction center.

Fifty-sixty thousand  new genetically diverse, young and healthy IDF soldiers are added to the registry each year with over half a million soldiers in the registry today!
Twenty years ago, there was an abysmal 8% chance of finding a bone marrow donor for a Jewish patient; today, because of the Ezer Mizion registry, this number has risen to an astounding 76%.
Shulamit is a 51 years old mother of 5 who is a twice breast cancer survivor. In 2015, she was diagnosed with leukemia.
Her doctors were concerned that having been through chemo twice already she may not survive a third time, but they decided to take the chance and look for a bone marrow donor. In the meantime, her son, who was living in Holland at the time, returned to Israel to help manage her medical care, including large numbers of blood donations.
“I had come to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t see my daughter drafted into the army, dance at my children’s weddings or meet my grandchildren.”
 All that changed when a soldier named Barak Schneider came into her life.
After some time, a match was found. Barak, a soldier in the IDF, had joined the Ezer Mizion Bone Marrow Registry when he was drafted into the army. He joined the army as an active athlete, having been Israel’s taekwondo champion and represented Israel in competitions around the world. He had only been in the army for half a year when he got the call that he was a match, but he didn’t hesitate at all.

Barak said, “My mother was concerned at first, but she calmed down when she realized that stem cell donation is a much simpler process these days than it used to be.”
Within two weeks Barak donated bone marrow to Shulamit and she began the process of recovery.

According to international law, the donation has to be kept anonymous for the first year. Then, after the patient heals they can meet their donor if they wish.
“Recently, I was privileged to meet Barak at Ezer Mizion’s Bone Marrow Registry headquarters. I couldn’t believe how young he was! Our meeting was extremely emotional. I told him that I consider him another son and he replied that he considers me a second mother.”
Even more amazing, Barak’s two older brothers were recently discovered to be a match for another patient. His oldest brother, Peleg, ended up donating to that person.

Shulamit said, “I never imagined that such a young person would save my life. I am eternally grateful to him for the chance to watch my children and grandchildren grow up. Thank you Barak and Ezer Mizion!”

Winnipeg native Solly Dreman has spent the latter part of his life living in Israel serving as a liason between the diaspora and Israel. Solly, who is a professor emeritus at Ben Gurion university and clinical psychologist, and who has used his unique interpersonal skills to help organizations throughout the world, has a very close bond with Ezer Mizion.
 “When I heard Shulamit’s story, and others like it, I realized how important it is to the Jewish community, whether on the other side of the world or right here in Winnipeg, that Ezer Mizion’s bone marrow registry flourish. The more people the organization can swab, in particular the young and healthy IDF soldiers that make up a large portion of the registry, the greater the chances of saving many more lives.”

Recently Ezer Mizion celebrated saving over 3100 lives in over 47 countries worldwide. It is special people like Barak and other Israeli soldiers that help save lives around the world. For more information you can visit www.Ezermizion.ca or call Dan Rand at 647-799-1475.

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Israel

Hamas murdered their friend. Now, they help Israeli soldiers to keep his memory alive

David Newman (right): David died helping to save the lives of others who were at the music festival on October 7 when Hamas massacred hundreds of attendees

By VIRGINIA ALLEN (The Daily Signal) David Newman sent a text to a friend the morning of Saturday, Oct. 7. Something terrible had happened. Word quickly spread among Newman’s group of friends, who had known each other since high school.
Newman, 25, had traveled the night before to the music festival in southern Israel, close to the border with the Gaza Strip. It was supposed to be a fun weekend with his girlfriend “celebrating life,” something Newman, who served with the Israel Defense Forces, was good at and loved to do, friend Gidon Hazony recalls.
When Hazony learned that Newman, his longtime friend, was in danger, he and another friend decided they were “going to go down and try and save him.” Trained as a medic and armed with a handgun and bulletproof vest, Hazony started driving south from Jerusalem.
Hazony and his friend ended up joining with other medical personnel and “treated probably around 50 soldiers and civilians in total that day,” Hazony recalls, but they kept trying to make it south to rescue Newman.

But the two “never made it down to the party, and that’s probably for the best,” Hazony says, “because that area was completely taken over by terrorists. And if we had gone down there, I think we would’ve been killed.”
Hazony later learned that Hamas terrorists had murdered Newman on Oct. 7, but not before Newman had saved nearly 300 lives, including the life of his girlfriend.
When the terrorists began their attack on the music festival, many attendees began running to their cars. But Newman and his girlfriend encountered a police officer who warned them to run the opposite direction because the terrorists were near the vehicles, says David Gani, another friend of Newman’s.
Newman “ran in the opposite direction with his girlfriend and whoever else he could kind of corral with him,” Gani explains during an interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
“They saw two industrial garbage cans, big containers, and so David told everyone, ‘Hide, hide in those containers,’” Gani says. “And so what he did over the course of the next few hours is, he would take people and … he was this big guy, and he would just chuck them in that container. And then he would go in, wait, wait till the coast is clear, and then he’d go back out, find more people, put them in there.”
Newman’s actions that day, and the atrocities Hazony and so many others in Israel witnessed Oct. 7, led Hazony, Gani, and several friends to quit their jobs and set up a nonprofit called Soldiers Save Lives. The organization is working to collect tactical and humanitarian aid for the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF.
According to the group’s website, Soldiers Save Lives has supplied over 20 IDF units and civilian response teams “with protective and self-defense gear.”
Gani, board chairman, chief financial officer, and chief technology officer of Soldiers Save Lives, and Hazony, president of the organization, recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to raise support and awareness for their mission to provide IDF troops with needed supplies.
If you would like to find out more about Soldiers Save Lives or donate to them, go to https://www.soldierssavelives.org/
Reprinted with permission.

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Israel

Our New Jewish Reality

Indigo bookstore in Toronto defaced

By HENRY SREBRNIK Since Oct. 7, we Jews have been witnessing an ongoing political and psychological pogrom. True, there have been no deaths (so far), but we’ve seen the very real threat of mobs advocating violence and extensive property damage of Jewish-owned businesses, and all this with little forceful reaction from the authorities.
The very day after the carnage, Canadians awoke to the news that the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust had inspired sustained celebrations in its major cities. And they have continued ever since. I’d go so far as to say the Trudeau government has, objectively, been more interested in preventing harm to Gazans than caring about the atrocities against Israelis and their state.
For diaspora Jews, the attacks of Oct. 7 were not distant overseas events and in this country since then they have inspired anti-Semitism, pure and simple, which any Jew can recognize. Even though it happened in Israel, it brought back the centuries-old memories of defenseless Jews being slaughtered in a vicious pogrom by wild anti-Semites.
I think this has shocked, deeply, most Jews, even those completely “secular” and not all that interested in Judaism, Israel or “Zionism.” Jewish parents, especially, now fear for their children in schools and universities. The statements universities are making to Jewish students across the country could not be clearer: We will not protect you, they all but scream. You’re on your own.
But all this has happened before, as we know from Jewish history. Long before Alfred Dreyfus and Theodor Herzl, the 1881 pogroms in tsarist Russia led to an awakening of proto-Zionist activity there, with an emphasis on the land of Israel. There were soon new Jewish settlements in Palestine.
The average Jew in Canada now knows that his or her friend at a university, his co-worker in an office, and the people he or she socializes with, may in fact approve, or at least not disapprove, of what happened that day in Israel. Acquaintances or even close friends may care far more about Israel killing Palestinians in Gaza. Such people may even believe what we may call “Hamas pogrom denial,” already being spread. Many people have now gone so far in accepting the demonization of Israel and Jews that they see no penalty attached to public expressions of Jew-hatred. Indeed, many academics scream their hatred of Israel and Jews as loud as possible.
One example: On Nov. 10, Toronto officers responded to a call at an Indigo bookstore located in the downtown. It had been defaced with red paint splashed on its windows and the sidewalk, and posters plastered to its windows.
The eleven suspects later arrested claimed that Indigo founder Heather Reisman (who is Jewish) was “funding genocide” because of her financial support of the HESEG Foundation for Lone Soldiers, which provides scholarships to foreign nationals who study in Israel after serving in the Israeli armed forces. By this logic, then, most Jewish properties and organizations could be targeted, since the vast majority of Jews are solidly on Israel’s side.
Were these vandals right-wing thugs or people recently arrived from the Middle East? No, those charged were mostly white middle-class professionals. Among them are figures from academia, the legal community, and the public education sector. Four are academics connected to York University (one of them a former chair of the Sociology Department) and a fifth at the University of Toronto; two are elementary school teachers; another a paralegal at a law firm.
Were their students and colleagues dismayed by this behaviour? On the contrary. Some faculty members, staff and students at the university staged a rally in their support. These revelations have triggered discussions about the role and responsibilities of educators, given their influential positions in society.
You’ve heard the term “quiet quitting.” I think many Jews will withdraw from various clubs and organizations and we will begin to see, in a sense like in the 1930s, a reversal of assimilation, at least in the social sphere. (Of course none of this applies to Orthodox Jews, who already live this way.)
Women in various feminist organizations may form their own groups or join already existing Jewish women’s groups. There may be an increase in attendance in K-12 Jewish schools. In universities, “progressive” Jewish students will have to opt out of organizations whose members, including people they considered friends, have been marching to the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and similar eliminationist rhetoric, while waving Palestinian flags.
This will mostly affect Jews on the left, who may be supporters of organizations which have become carriers of anti-Semitism, though ostensibly dealing with “human rights,” “social justice,” and even “climate change.”
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg took part in a demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm on Oct. 22 in which she chanted “crush Zionism” along with hundreds of other anti-Israel protesters. Israel is now unthinkingly condemned as a genocidal apartheid settler-colonialist state, indeed, the single most malevolent country in the world and the root of all evil.
New York Times Columnist Bret Stephens expressed it well in his Nov. 7 article. “Knowing who our friends aren’t isn’t pleasant, particularly after so many Jews have sought to be personal friends and political allies to people and movements that, as we grieved, turned their backs on us. But it’s also clarifying.”
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.

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Israel

Former Winnipegger Vivian Silver, at first thought to have been taken hostage, has now been confirmed dead

Jewish Post & News file photo

Former Winnipegger and well-known Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver has now been confirmed as having been killed during the massacre of Israelis and foreign nationals perpetrated by Hamas terrorists on October 7. Vivian, a resident of Kibbutz Be’eri was originally thought to be among the more than 1200 individuals who were taken hostage by Hamas.

To read the full story on the CBC website, go to https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/israel-gaza-vivian-silver-1.7027333

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