Radical way to boost organ donation

Ynet
Israel launches first of its kind law which has raised resistance from ultra-Orthodox community: If you sign donor card, you and your family move up in line for transplant if one is needed...

........Only 10% of Israeli adults hold donor cards, compared with more than 30% in most Western countries. The actual rate of families donating a deceased's organs is 45%, but in other countries it rises to 70%, according to Jacob Lavee, director of the heart transplant unit at Israel's Sheba Medical Center.
The low rate of organ donation is thought to be partly driven by religious considerations. Most rabbis have no problem with transplants to save lives; their objection is to profiting from or needlessly mutilating cadavers. But 99-year-old Rabbi Yosef Sholom Elyashiv takes a different view, and he is one of ultra-Orthodox Jewry's most influential leaders, claiming 100,000 followers among Israel's six million Jews. Elyashiv forbids organ donation before cardiac death, but allows his followers to receive lifesaving donations. 

.......Israel's unwieldy system of coalition government makes implementation [of the new law] uncertain. One of its members is an ultra-Orthodox party made up of Elyashiv's followers. Among its lawmakers is Yaakov Litzman, who happens to be the deputy health minister (the top post is vacant). 

.......Robby Berman, founder and director of the Halachic Organ Donor Society, a Jewish organization based in New York, said ultra-Orthodox Jews can't have it both ways.
"My position is if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem," he said. "Every Jew has a right to be against an organ donation, but then you can't come and say 'give me an organ.'"  Full story   

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