The outlook for Israel’s first heart transplant patient appeared slightly improved today, the third day since surgery was performed by a team headed by Dr. Morris Levi at the Beilinson Hospital in Petach Tikvah. Dr. Levi said he was more “optimistic” than he had been in the past 24 hours although the patient, 41-year-old Itzhak Sullam, was still unconscious.
Dr. Levi said there was no sign that Mr. Sullam’s body was rejecting the heart, that his blood pressure and breathing were normal and he did not require the aid of artificial breathing mechanisms or even oxygen. The patient’s wife was permitted to see him through a window. The Sullams have four children. Mr. Sullam, an immigrant from Algeria who settled in Israel in 1948 and was employed as an elevator operator in the Bank Leumi building in Jaffa, became the world’s 99th heart transplant patient Friday. He was reported in satisfactory condition initially but yesterday his condition was reported to be critical as his body apparently started to reject the new heart. A special anti-rejection serum was flown here from France but at noon yesterday it was reported that the patient’s condition had deteriorated. Today, however, a medical report said the drug had been used only as a precautionary measure.
The heart surgery performed on Mr. Sullam appeared to have complications other than medical ones as a result of questions of Jewish law involved. The Sephardic Chief Rabbi, Yitzhak Nissim, expressed best wishes for the patient’s recovery Friday without taking a special position on whether Jewish law permitted such an operation. The Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi, Isser Unterman, also expressed good wishes but said that from the Halachic (religious law) point of view there are reservations and restrictions that could make heart transplant surgery unacceptable.
Rabbi Untermann said transplants are permitted on condition that there is no shadow of a doubt that the donor is dead when his heart is extracted. Discussing the matter several weeks ago, the Chief Rabbi said a man should be considered dead when he stopped breathing. But the question of the exact moment when death occurs is one on which all medical authorities have not yet agreed. In Mr. Sullam’s case, the identity of the donor has been a closely guarded secret. Some reports said it was a traffic accident victim. The Chief Rabbinate is apparently waiting for further details of the circumstances before taking a stand in the case. A spokesman for the Chief Rabbinate told reporters today that unofficially Rabbi Nissim would like a mixed team of rabbis and doctors to decide in each case if a donor is dead according to all criteria.
Forty-two-year-old Dr. Levi who performed the eight-hour operation on Mr. Sullam was born in Bulgaria and studied medicine in Israel. He trained in Tokyo and between 1961 and 1964 he studied at the Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis where he was a classmate of Dr. Christian Barnard of South Africa, who performed the world’s first heart transplant operation in Cape Town a year ago. Mr. Sullam had been suffering from a severe heart ailment for more than a year.
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