Researchers: Hagai Boas¹, Eviatar Nesher², Rachel Michowitz², Vered Nisanov Kofman²

Background: Living organ donations are the main source for kidney transplantations in Israel. These donations come from two social circles: the family and the community, The second circle is of donations from living persons who volunteer to donate to strangers refers to donations. Current literature argues that donations to strangers come mainly from the religious and Haredi sectors and is aimed only to the Jewish population.

Objectives: This study examines this contention by drawing the socio-demographic profile of the two groups of donors.

Method: It performs a survey of 749 respondents (400 donors who donated to their relatives, 349 donors who donated to strangers). The respondents' answer were analyzed by methods of descriptive statistics, cluster analysis and logistic regression analysis.

Findings: Findings prove that most of the donors who come from the community define themselves as religious or Haredi. It is also found that these donors are mainly men, educated and reside in small communities. No significance difference was found in the tolerance scale between the two groups, most of the donors from the community said that they would prefer that their recipient's national identity would be as theirs. They were more indifferent as to their recipients' level of religiosity.

Conclusions: This study validates the claim that living donations to strangers in Israel is bounded withing the Jewish population.

Recommendations: In order to overcome the inequality in organ donations, without reducing these life-saving donations, we recommend to boost awareness to universal unconditional donations through the Israeli Transplant Center.

Research end date: 05/2023