Celebrating 10 found years through Gift of Life

Ten years ago on erev Pesach, Brian (Yaakov) Hagler of Woodmere was playing basketball with friends, dribbling down the court, when his legs gave out; he felt that he had no strength.

After sitting on the side, he went home. His wife, Ruchy, noticed an unexplained bruise under his eye. He went to the doctor.

“I never go to the doctor,” he said, maybe once a year for a check up, but he never recalled being ill. After blood and urine tests, the doctor called him down to the office and told him that he had acute leukemia. He contacted a husband-wife pair of oncologists from his shul, Anshe Chesed in Hewlett, Drs. Peter and Laurel Steinherz of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Camp Simcha, “Malachim (angels),” said Hagler, “great people.”

Events snowballed. He and his wife spent Pesach in Sloan, making a seder there. He told the 12 boys he was teaching to read their bar mitzvah parshiot that lessons were suspended; he notified his shul where he was president, and his children spent Pesach in the hotel where they had planned to go with his in-laws. “It was overwhelming,” he said. “You hope you are going to wake up, this is crazy.” And then, “I was in and out of the hospital for three to four months and Gift of Life found a perfect match.”

On Sept. 14, Hagler will be the MC at the Second Annual Gift of Life’s 5K Walk for Life at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow. Registration will be at 10 am, with a welcome ceremony and Hagler speaking at 10:30, introducing a bone marrow donor and recipient for the first time. The walk begins at 11 and concludes by 1 pm, with kosher food, music, raffles and a kids’ area with balloons and face painting.

Gift of life was founded in 1991 after Jay Feinberg, then 23, was diagnosed with leukemia and could not find a transplant match to save his life since the donor registries available at that time did not have many of his Jewish ethnicity.

His mother, Arlene Feinberg, along with friends and family, organized bone marrow drives, enrolling thousands of donors worldwide and, after four years of searching, finally located a donor match for Feinberg. Mother and son founded the organization to help save other people.

Gift of Life currently has 235,270 registered donors and facilitated 2,701 transplants; it serves 43 countries.

“We are hoping to raise at least $50,000,” said Gregg Francis, Chief Operating and Chief Financial Officer of Gift of Life, headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. He said that last year 200 attended and this year they are expecting 350. He said that all the funds raised will be used to process testing kits that were used to find potential matches to save the lives of those suffering from blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma.

HAFTR has held community drives to recruit donors over the years, finding more than 30 matches.

Dr. Adam Lish, HAFTR’s vice president of education and a volunteer on the planning committee for this year’s Walk for Life, was “swabbed” in one of the drives 12 years ago. He was called upon to be a bone marrow donor two years later and noted that the recipient is now a healthy young man in college. Team HAFTR will be represented in the walk, with Lish’s son Justin, a HAFTR junior, team captain. Daughter Samantha, who was graduated from HAFTR this year, ran a bone marrow drive with her brother at her senior dinner.

Having the team, said Lish, is “one of the methods to generate capital and interest; the teams run and raises money as a group.” He stressed the importance of this chesed and the importance of raising awareness in teens, noting that they are also using social media in the campaign.

Lish pointed out that when students in high school are aware of these drives, they can get swabbed at the earliest age, “the earlier you get swabbed the longer you are in the database.” He said that the children who witnessed their parents being swabbed at HAFTR drives over the years are now stepping forward and running drives and getting swabbed themselves. He cited the “adults modeling behavior” as an “important chinuch (educational) opportunity” and that now the “kids are running it.”

“The Orthodox community is heavily represented among the donors. When called upon they donate. It’s not pleasant, it’s uncomfortable, but they donate regardless of the recipient.”

Hagler’s match was Michal Levine, a young woman from North Miami Beach who was a student at Barnard College and living in Washington Heights. They met a year after he received her bone marrow.

“What do you say,” asked Hagler rhetorically. “You can’t say thank you-that’s for someone who gives you a parking space. I was living on borrowed time. There are no words.” Levine became part of Hagler’s family, coming for Shabbat. When she was planning her wedding six years ago, she asked him to sing at her chuppa. He did and his family came to the wedding in Lakewood. She now has one child with another on the way and a PhD from Johns Hopkins in lymphocytes. “I had ALL-acute lymphocytic leukemia,” said Hagler. “She went into that field of research.”

He said that the “patient gets help from different people, the spouse doesn’t” and praised his wife noting that she “says I have a responsibility to help the organization.” Together, they visit others who are sick to give chizuk, strength, support and reassurance.

So now, on the tenth anniversary of his rebirth, Hagler says Boruch Hashem (thank G-d), and he’s talking about his experience “to raise awareness, raise funds. Saving a life is saving a life. It’s not controversial.”

“Nothing ever happens till it happens,” said Hagler. “Once it’s in your family it changes everybody; it has to change.”