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November 14, 2003/Cheshvan 19 5764, Vol. 56, No. 8
Hillel hosts organ donor week
BETH OLSON
Staff Writer
Organ donation is an important issue to Marcie Lee - if her father had not had a heart transplant in 1986, she likely would have had 16 fewer years to spend with him.
Lee's father, Arthur Schoenberg, died May 17, 2002, nearly 16 years after he was the oldest recipient of a heart transplant in the United States, at the age of 66. At the time, it was recommended that heart transplants not be performed on people over the age of 55.
The transplant allowed Schoenberg, who had a "tenacious will to live," according to Lee, to live to see his grandchildren grow up.
"It was a new life for him, and new life for us, and a life with my children that we never expected to have," says Lee.
A year after her father's death, Lee has coordinated Hillel Jewish Student Center's first Organ Donor Awareness Week.
Events will include an informational session with an organ recipient from the Donor Network of Arizona; a panel discussion about religious perspectives on organ donation led by Lee; and the Arthur Schoenberg Memorial Miniature Golf Tournament.
Lee's hope is to get people talking about organ donation, as well as stem cell research, which in the future may provide people in need of transplants with their own regenerated organs.
"What I'm really hoping for - and one of the reasons this is so important to me - is that transplantation will eventually be seen, not too long from now, as a transition between no chance for people with heart failure and a chance for all of us, through stem cell research, to have our own organs regenerated," says Lee.
Lee, the wife of Hillel Executive Director Rabbi Barton Lee, is the director of Hillel's Teaching Scholars Program, which trains religious school teachers, and a faculty associate at Arizona State University.
Organ Donor Awareness Week events
- What: Organ donation info session
- When: 1 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18
- Where: Hillel Jewish Student Center, 1012 S. Mill Ave., Tempe
- Cost: Free
- What: Religious Perspectives on Organ Donation
- When: 3 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20
- Where: Arizona State University, Memorial Union, Room 223
- Cost: Free
- What: Arthur Schoenberg Memorial Miniature Golf Tournament
- When: 11:30 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 23
- Where: Fiddlesticks, 1155 W. Elliot Road, Tempe
- Cost: $10 per two-person team
- Call: 480-967-7563
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