18-year-old hosts blood donor party
Five minutes after he turned 18, Mordy Slavin contacted the Gift of Life Foundation, volunteering to donate blood.
18 is the minimum age permissible for blood donors and Mordy wanted to become involved with Shula Endrey-Walder’s organisation which attempts to find suitable donors for stem cell and bone marrow transplants in a bid to save dying patients’ lives world-wide.
“What is remarkable”, Endrey-Walder told J-Wire, “is that on the very day Mordy called me, we were advised that a three-year-old girl in Israel and a 15-year-old boy in New York had just been added to the registry urgently in need of finding suitable donors to save their lives. Mordy and his friends can only increase their chances.”
After Mordy Slavin had finalised arrangements with The Gift of Life, he got busy organising people to come to the function held at The Big Kitchen run by his father Rabbi Dovid Slavin.
Mordy Slavin, a student at Sydney’s Yeshiva College, told J-Wire: “I contacted the local and Jewish papers, put it on Facebook and sent out over 500 e-mails to attract others to donate alongside him….and I stood in the street in Bondi Junction handing out flyers.”
Manager of The Big Kitchen, Rebecca Jacobs, added: “This was a remarkable achievement by an 18-year-old. The Big Kitchen and The Gift of Life hope to host more events like this. Every one in the community should be donating blood to add to the registry’s records.”
Many life-threatening cases within the Jewish world have found suitable blood matches for stem cell and bone-marrow transplants only from the world-wide Jewish community when direct family matches had proved unsuccessful.
Slavin spread the word throughout Jewish Sydney, displaying posters in schools, synagogues and shops…
A delighted Endrey-Walder told J-Wire: “Well he turned 18 and apart from himself we had 18 new donors…a more than satisfactory result. Well done, Mordy.”
For someone, somewhere, the efforts of this committed 18-year-old may prove to be the catalyst which will save a life.