News
Jay Feinberg '90 Receives Bronfman Prize
By: Dickinson College
Dickinson College Alumni News
April 30, 2004
Feinberg, the executive director of the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation, received the new $100,000 Humanitarian Award on Wednesday. The Prize celebrates "individuals whose accomplishments on behalf of others enrich Jewish life."
It was established by the family of philanthropist Charles Bronfman to honor his 70th birthday.
Jay Feinberg was a political-science major at Dickinson who planned to go to law school after graduation. At the age of 22 he was diagnosed with leukemia and told that a bone-marrow transplant was his only hope. Friends and family organized donor drives to collect blood samples to test for matching tissue types. The testing added thousands of donor names to various registries around the world. After his successful transplant in 1995, Jay continued the efforts to identify donors.
He organized the Gift of Life Foundation, which became an official bone-marrow registry in 1997. Gift of Life is ranked 12th in size out of 53 donor registries. Through the foundation's work, over 75,000 donors have been registered with Gift of Life, 60,000 registered with other worldwide programs, and nearly 1,000 donor-recipient matches facilitated.
Jay and the foundation were profiled in the spring 2001 issue of Dickinson Magazine. A Gift of Life donor drive will take place at Dickinson College on Sunday, May 2 at the Milton B. Asbell Center for Jewish Life.
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