Santa Monica Man meets the mother of three he helped

A young Santa Monica man last night met the Florida mother of three whose life he saved with a blood stem cell transplant through the Gift of Life Marrow Registry.

The donor, Jonah Sharf, 22, who works at a sports and entertainment business in L.A., joined the marrow registry with a simple cheek swab during a Birthright Israel trip in January 2017 and was called to donate just five months later.

“I would absolutely donate again,” said Sharf. “If I have a unique opportunity to help someone in a way that few other people in the world could, I will use it over and over again.”

The transplant recipient, Amber Delgado, 31, has a nine-year old and two five-year-old children and was diagnosed with Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML) in 2012. She received her lifesaving blood stem cells in 2017 at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla.

By law donors and recipients must remain anonymous for at least one year, and Sharf and Delgado learned one another’s identities at a joint event of Gift of Life and the Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) fraternity last night during the 2019 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference in Washington, D.C. Sharf is an AEPi brother.

“I think he’s an awesome person — he was able to help somebody he doesn’t even know so that they could live a fuller life,” Delgado said of Sharf.

Since its start in 1991, Gift of Life has grown the registry to more than 330,000 individuals who have volunteered to donate blood stem cells or bone marrow to save a life. In the process, the organization has facilitated over 16,000 matches for those with a range of blood cancers, resulting in more than 3,400 transplants.

For more details about Gift of Life, please contact Joe Berkofsky, at joe@puderpr.com