Sara Miller’s older sister, Laura, was 14 when tragedy struck.
“On Feb.18, 2009, Laura was a vibrant high school freshman at Nicolet, dreaming of one day becoming editor-in-chief of Vogue; on Feb. 21 she was brain dead,” Sara said in a Jan. 29 telephone interview from Washington University in St. Louis, where she is now a freshman.
It remains a great comfort to her and her family, Sara said, that Laura — who died of a malignant brain tumor — saved the life of an East Coast woman, 40 at the time, who was the recipient of Laura’s liver.
In the midst of a nightmarish situation — Laura hospitalized and her condition rapidly deteriorating — the Miller family responded positively when told Laura was a candidate for organ donation.
“Both me and my younger sister, Rachel — she was nine at the time — wanted to donate Laura’s organs,” Sara said.
Sara acknowledged that the family’s Jewish faith helped with the decision.
“My parents talked to the rabbi [Ronald Shapiro of Congregation Shalom in Fox Point], who said that Jewish law supports [organ donation],” Sara said. “The rabbi provided guidance — helped us to better understand the direction in which we were moving. He did not make the decision for us.”
A sacred value
In a telephone interview Jan. 15, Rabbi Noah Chertkoff of Congregation Shalom said that for Reform Judaism, saving a life is of paramount importance, overriding concerns within Jewish tradition that might appear to stand in the way of organ donation.
He cited Rabbi Mark Washofsky of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati as the legal authority for the movement.
Writing in the March/April 2006 issue of Moment Magazine, Washofsky stated, “The Reform movement’s position is to permit transplantation of organs or body parts from a corpse for any legitimate medical purpose.”
He argued that the Jewish obligation to save lives and to heal the sick overcomes the Jewish law prohibitions against deriving benefit from the dead, treating the corpse in a disrespectful manner and unnecessarily delaying burial of the corpse in its entirety.
“To be agents of life and healing after our deaths is to render honor and respect to our bodies. It is not an act of desecration or mutilation,” Washofsky wrote.
The Reconstructionist movement agrees. Rabbi Tiferet Berenbaum of Congregation Shir Hadash in Milwaukee said in a telephone interview Jan. 14 that organ donation is “absolutely acceptable to Reconstructionists — saving a life trumps everything, and there is an obligation to donate one’s organs after death” to save the life of another.
Rabbi Jacob Herber of Congregation Beth Israel Ner Tamid in Milwaukee said in a telephone interview Feb. 3 that, for the Conservative movement, organ donation after death “is not just permissible, but [according to Jewish law] obligatory.”
He said his own thinking is in accord with that of Rabbi Elliot Dorff, originally from Milwaukee and now rector of the American Jewish University in California.
Dorff has written in a 2003 book that “saving a person’s life is so sacred a value in Judaism that if a person’s organ can be used to save someone else’s life, it is actually an honor to the deceased” (“Matters of Life and Death: A Jewish Approach to Modern Medical Ethics”).
In recent years, the Orthodox Jewish community has become more accepting of organ donation, said Rabbi Gil-Ezer Lerer of Temple Menorah in Milwaukee in a telephone interview Jan. 16 — a change from the widespread and longstanding misconception that Judaism forbids it.
He noted the effect of the case of Alisa Flatow, a Brandeis University junior studying in Jerusalem in 1995, declared brain dead following a terrorist attack.
According to an online account by Rabbi Avi Friedman (Oct. 9, 2012), Flatow’s family “decided to donate her viable organs to six different people in Israel, (and) out of her death, six people lived.”
According to an article by Rabbi Joseph Prouser (“Hesed or Hiyuv? The Obligation to Preserve Life and the Question of Post-Mortem Organ Donation,” available on the Rabbinical Assembly website), studies have shown that giving life to others through the donation of a deceased loved one’s organs often mitigates the family’s grief.
Phyllis Lensky of Glendale, in a telephone interview Feb. 3, told of learning this first-hand. She developed a relationship with the family of the man — lost to a cerebral aneurysm — who donated the liver that saved the life of her husband, Harry Lensky.
“Responding to my letter thanking them for their wonderful gift,” Phyllis Lensky said, the donor’s widow “said she felt something good was coming out of tragedy.”
While most Jewish legal authorities today agree there are no problems with organ donation itself, there is less agreement about defining exactly when a potential organ donor has died.
In an address to the Medical Ethics Society of Yeshiva University in January 2013, Orthodox Rabbi Edward Reichman, M.D., originally from Milwaukee and an associate professor of emergency medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, said that with the advent of life support technology, a person on a respirator can be brain dead but still have a heartbeat.
Some authorities accept brain death as a Jewish legal definition of death, he said; others regard the removal of organs from a donor with a beating heart as violation of a prohibition against killing someone to save another life.
Medical texts define brain death as permanent functional death of the centers in the brain that control breathing, pupillary and other vital reflexes.
Reconstructionist legal authority Rabbi David Teutsch said in an email Jan. 20, “the dominant view” is that “brain death is the determinant” of when death has occurred. Chertkoff said Reform Judaism would support acceptance of brain death as defining death.
Legal authorities of the Conservative movement, such as Dorff, define death as the total cessation of brain and brain stem activity.
Biologist and Orthodox Rabbi Moshe Tendler, an authority on Jewish medical ethics, and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel have identified brain death as “a criterion for confirming death in a patient who already has irreversible absence of spontaneous respiration.”
People who are still alive can also donate organs, and there is no Jewish law objection to this, Herber said.
According to Reichman, the key issue for living donors is the amount of risk they incur in donating a lobe of liver or lung, a kidney, bone marrow, blood or skin.
The consensus among modern rabbinic legal authorities is that “one may undergo a small risk to save someone else from certain danger or death” (see the website AISH.com).
Freelance writer Lynne Kleinman, Ph.D., is a retired teacher and journalist.
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