How four Torah-observant doctors created a veritable blood bank for COVID research, and created a global kiddush Hashem in the process

As a teenager in London. Rabbi Mordechai Miller, later the long-time principal of Gateshead Seminary, used to learn after school with Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler. Rav Dessler told his young talmid that he should always go to the upper deck of the double-decker bus for the one-stop ride to his apartment. He explained that since Mordechai would only be on the bus briefly, perhaps the conductor would not reach him in time to take his fare. Then he — an identifiably religious Jewish young man — would say in a loud voice to whoever was seated near him, “The conductor did not take my fare. Here it is. Could you please give it to him when he gets here?” Rav Dessler’s lesson was startling: It is not enough that our behavior, wherever we find ourselves, should make a kiddush Hashem. We must actively seek out opportunities to create it.

How did a small group of Orthodox Jewish doctors manage to turn the past year’s tragic, extensive spread of the coronavirus in Orthodox communities into an opportunity to learn more about the virus through research, and create a kiddush Hashem in the process?

As the virus spread with lightning speed within a week of Purim last year, a main concern of Brooklyn pediatrician and Philadelphia Yeshiva graduate Dr. Israel (Sruli) Zyskind was to get out as much information as possible to a population desperately searching for guidance, and to alert the Torah leadership to the dangers ahead. He also created a WhatsApp group called OrthoDocs together with his friend Dr. Jason (Shimshi) Zimmerman, an emergency room physician, who serves as the medical director of Hatzolah of Central Jersey and Chevra Hatzalah of New York, in order to facilitate sharing the most current information about the pandemic among Orthodox doctors.

Through OrthoDocs, Dr. Zyskind reconnected with his old friend Dr. Avi Rosenberg, a professor and researcher at Johns Hopkins Medical Center. (Dr. Rosenberg is also a mohel, who travels widely to perform particularly intricate brissim.) The two had been pre-med students in Brooklyn College together while also learning in yeshivah, and now, more than 20 years later, they were in constant contact, even as each was besieged with phone calls and emails from those seeking advice. Many of their conversations centered on the negative publicity directed at the Torah community over the high rates of COVID-19 infection, and what could be done to counter that publicity.

A conference call that took place on Yom Tov of Acharon Shel Pesach (April 16, 2020) reflected how dire the situation was for both the Orthodox community in the tristate area and the general public, having been pounded daily by one painful loss after another. On that call to discuss the potential use of blood plasma drawn from recovered COVID-19 patients were three askanim who had created the COVID Plasma Initiative — Chaim Lebovits, Mordy Serle, and Mordechai Swiatycki; Rabbi Yehuda Kaszrirer of Lakewood’s Lev Rochel Bikur Cholim; and senior doctors from a number of New York City area hospitals. They were on the line with Dr. Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic, which had been appointed by the FDA to take the lead in investigating the use of blood plasma for treating COVID. Rabbi Kaszirer would say later of that call, “The Gemara’s words, ‘shochtim l’choleh b’Shabbos,’ took on new meaning.”

At that time, the Mayo Clinic had one of the very few assays in the country capable of testing antibody levels in drawn blood. Dr. Joyner committed to testing at least 1,500 hundred vials, estimating that it would probably take two weeks to collect blood from that many donors. Yet just three days later, with a Shabbos in between, Lev Rochel drew blood from 1,400 recovered donors in Lakewood alone, even as it was dealing with hundreds of cases of desperately ill COVID sufferers. That effort required setting up 16 tents on an open field to preserve social distancing, and making sure that sufficient numbers of medical personnel, tubing to draw the blood, and centrifuges to spin it were on hand. As soon as the blood drawing was complete, Rabbi Kaszirer was on a private plane with the precious tranche of vials en route to the small airport in Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic. When Rabbi Kaszirer landed, Dr. Joyner pronounced himself “shocked” by the single day’s exceptional turnout.

That blood plasma drive set off a light in the heads of Drs. Zyskind and Rosenberg. As a research scientist specializing in renal pathology, Dr. Rosenberg knew that hundreds of labs around the world were being repurposed to engage in COVID-19 research. And they would all need blood samples for their work. The Orthodox community had just demonstrated that it could be a major source of blood for study, and here was an opportunity to leverage the community’s strengths — its idealism and volunteer spirit and ability to organize quickly — to convey a succinct but powerful message: “We care about our neighbors, we want to be good citizens, and we want to advance science in order to reduce human suffering.”

And that’s why they created an initiative called MITZVA Cohort — an acronym for the Multi-Institutional Study Analyzing Anti-CoV-2 Antibodies — to spur medical research on COVID-19 by making available to leading researchers blood and saliva samples taken from Orthodox Jews.