Hillel pitches in to help East Side neighbor in need of bone marrow donor

by Kate Bramson

When Brown Hillel members learned that neighbor Eileen Rosenberg-Black needed help finding a bone marrow donor, the University’s Jewish community was eager to get involved.

Hillel worked to expand the student portion of Brown’s spring blood drive into a bone marrow registration drive as well, hoping to find a match for Rosenberg-Black, a 56-year-old wife and mother of two teens. The East Side resident is battling a rare form of leukemia and hopes a bone marrow transplant will help in her fight against the progressive disease.

Helping a neighbor is what Hillel is all about, said Rabbi Richard Kirschen, executive director of the Hillel Foundation.

“We try to make a difference in the neighborhood and on campus,” he said. “It’s a very normal Jewish response. She needs help.”

So Hillel is working with Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi, one of the sponsors of the May blood drive, to have a bone marrow registration drive at the same time. Hillel began promoting the bone marrow drive during the Passover holiday and will include information about it in its weekly e-mail messages to about 1,200 in the campus Jewish community, according to Aaron Katchen, Hillel’s director of Jewish campus life.

The blood and bone marrow registration drive is May 6-8 in Sayles Hall.

The May 7 portion of the drive is sponsored by Brown employees, who also wanted to expand the blood drive so that people could register as potential bone marrow donors. Employee Stephen Morin, director of environmental health and safety, was particularly interested in expanding the blood drive.

“My son had leukemia when he was 6, and so that’s why it’s so near and dear to my heart,” he said. Morin’s son is now 10 and doing well, in part because of blood donations he received during treatment.

The May drive is one of many local bone marrow registration drives being held this year. Other sponsors of registration drives to help Rosenberg-Black include Temple Torat Yisrael in Cranston, Rhode Island Hospital, Temple Emanuel in Providence, University of Rhode Island, Tifereth Israel Congregation in New Bedford and Woodbridge School in Cranston.

When people register as potential bone marrow donors, their names and data are entered into a worldwide registry. The National Marrow Donor Program is a network of transplant and donor centers that focus on recruiting and matching potential donors with patients who need transplants.

The Donor Program has more than 4.5 million people registered as potential donors. When Rosenberg-Black’s data was entered into that worldwide registry, the Donor Program came up with three preliminary matches.

However, she’s searching for a closer match because the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, which would perform her transplant, has told her it would like to find an even more genetically specific match.

Rosenberg-Black recognizes that, after a search of 4.5 million people resulted in just three preliminary matches for her, a better match may not exist.

But that’s not what these registration drives are all about, she said.

“People aren’t necessarily coming out to help me, but they are coming out to help someone like me,” she said. “My hope is that someone somewhere has registered and potentially they could match me.”

And someone moved by Rosenberg-Black’s plight here in Rhode Island might come out to a drive in her name but end up saving the life of someone halfway across the world, across the country, or even in Cranston or Pawtucket.

Kirschen, too, acknowledges that he knows a local drive may not result in a donor for Hillel’s neighbor. Nevertheless, encouraging community members to register as potential donors “is the work of saving lives,” he said.

And in Jewish tradition, the idea behind performing mitzvot – or good deeds – is not necessarily to see the fruition of the mitzvot.

“The greatest act of tzedakah – which means justice – is doing tzedakah where no one knows you did the deed,” Kirschen said.

Bone marrow registration and blood drive

When: May 6, noon to 6 p.m.; May 7, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; May 8, noon to 6 p.m.

Where: Sayles Hall

Other: No registration necessary. Donors must be ages 18 to 60, in good health, willing to give a small sample of blood and to seriously consider helping any patient if they’re found to match someone’s bone marrow.