Jay Feinberg

By 1995, more than 55,000 people had been tested. Feinberg's condition was rapidly deteriorating and only a partial match had been found. A friend in Milwaukee organized one last drive and teenager Becky Faibisoff, a 16-year-old girl from Illinois, was found to be a match. Feinberg received his successful transplant at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA.

Feinberg was a 22-year-old foreign-exchange analyst for the Federal Reserve in New York in 1991, just starting law school when he was diagnosed with leukemia and told that a bone marrow transplant was his only hope. A matching donor was not found in Feinberg's immediate family. Knowing that tissue type is influenced by one's ethnic background - inherited like eye color, his friends and relatives widened their search to the unrelated population, focusing on increasing the representation of Ashkenazi Jews.

Feinberg's plight, along with that of Mario Cooper, a graphic design artist, and Erskine Henderson, an attorney at Skadden Arps, was featured in a 1991 New York Times article. Massive screenings were organized in Jewish communities throughout North America and Israel. In addition, screenings were held in Belarus (by Arnie Draiman and Bill Begal), Australia and South Africa.

Jay Feinberg (born August 1968 in New York City) is a long-term leukemia survivor, community organizer and founder and current CEO of the Gift of Life Marrow Registry.