There was hardly a dry eye in the room last month when Sheila Barry, a retired college professor in Massachusetts, met the man who give her life – Brady Goldstein of St. Petersburg. It came as a total surprise to the professor. It took place in a lecture room at Stonehill College south of Boston as Sheila was telling about 60 students how a stranger had given her a much-needed donation of stem cells that saved her life from a form of cancer that affects the blood cells in the bone marrow.

You have heard it before… pickleball is more than a sport. And, one pickleball player from the Delray Beach, Florida community is proving that to be true. In fact, she is proving that pickleball is the vehicle to find and build a community. Daniella Niss started playing pickleball a few years ago with her husband, Michael, as a way to do something fun together and exercise.

In the early 1990s, Yehuda Kaplan was gravely ill with lymphoma and was urgently seeking a bone marrow transplant—a lifesaving procedure that removes blood-forming stem cells from a healthy donor’s bones and transplants them into a person who does not have enough healthy blood cells, due to a serious illness. While the transplants are highly effective, they are quite rare, as they require both the donor and recipient to be a perfect genetic match.

On Sunday, Nov. 28, the first night of the eight-day Jewish holiday, thousands attended the 2021 National Hanukkah Menorah lighting ceremony on the Ellipse, just across from the White House in Washington D.C. Hanukkah always begins at sunset on the 25th day of the month of Kislev, according to the Jewish lunar calendar.

Following a seminar held on Nov. 12 in the Meehan School of Business, Professor Emerita of Biology Sheila Barry opened the floor to questions. In compliance with COVID guidelines, attendees were masked throughout the lecture, which focused on Barry’s recent stem cell transplant. Several audience members took advantage of the opportunity to ask about Barry’s experience with myelofibrosis, a bone marrow cancer that disrupts production of blood cells.

My first interaction with the organization Gift of Life, whose purpose is to facilitate bone marrow and blood stem cell donations in hopes of curing blood cancer, was in the winter of 2019 while I was in yeshiva in Israel. A representative from the organization spoke to us one evening about what they do, the importance of swabbing for potential matches and what could potentially happen if someone was a match.