If you save one life, it is as if you have saved the world. Saving a human life seems like it would be difficult. How do you do that? Fight fires? Perform emergency surgery? Stop a war? Those would be great things to do, but there’s an easier way. Get your cheek swabbed.

The Gift of Life Marrow Registry, a public bone marrow and blood stem cell registry, is launching a swab campaign with the goal of finding a match for Steve, an active member of both his local and the broader Jewish community. Steve’s family reached out to the Gift of Life in the hope of creating a network of specifically Ashkenazi Jews (but everyone should swab!) who could potentially be a match.

By Sammy Intrator In 2019, during my gap year at Yeshivat Orayta in the Old City of Jerusalem, a Gift of Life representative came to speak with us about the incredible story of its founder and CEO, Jay Feinberg. Thirty years ago, at the age of 22 — not much older than me — Jay was told by his doctor that he had leukemia and that his only chance of survival was a bone marrow transplant from a donor who had a similar ethnic background.

A simple cheek swab in 2016 led Cody Marney of Choteau to be a bone marrow donor in June of 2021 for a 9-year-old girl with leukemia. "I registered after watching a movie centered around childhood leukemia," Marney, a 2005 Choteau High School graduate and a stylist at The Edge Salon since 2012, said. "The end of the movie had one of those, for more information visit the Gift of Life website," he added. The initial registry process was a simple cheek swab through the mail.

Stem cell donor Rabbi Eliana Yolkut, 43, from Washington, D.C., met her recipient Dalia Gera, a 39-year-old interior designer from Mazkeret Batya, Israel during the Steps for Life closing ceremony. They were introduced by Gift of Life Chairman Emeritus and Board Member, William A. Begal.

Annabelle Kopcan, a senior who is majoring in speech language pathology, went way out of her comfort zone to save the life of a stranger. Kopcan donated her stem cells through the Gift of Life Marrow Registry to a man in Florida who was battling a type of blood cancer.