Heard the one about the rabbi's kidney? It's no joke

By N. Clark Judd

So a rabbi and a comic walk out of surgery.

About a week later they’re joking around in the comic’s Riverdale apartment. On the wall is a picture of him telling a joke at the Friar’s Club with Jerry Lewis and Robert DeNiro cracking up to his left, but that day, it’s the rabbi who delivers the punchline.

Which fits. After all, the rabbi gave his comedian brother one of his kidneys.

“I’m being very careful,” begins the rabbi, Moish Drelich, an associate principal at Salanter Akiba Riverdale Academy, as he talks about the recovery process.

“He’s not listening to the doctor,” says the comic, Michael Drelich, better known by his stage name, Max Alexander. At 54, he’s an established comedian, with numerous supporting roles in Hollywood films, repeat Tonight Show appearances and Jerry Lewis’ number in his phone.

“He’s not. He gets too tired, and he gets cranky, and then he eats fiber. I’m telling you, the guy has so much fiber, he’s sweating blankets,” he says. “Blankets are coming out of his pores.” “T

“That’s it,” says the rabbi. “I want my kidney back.”

Mr. Alexander came to Riverdale from Los Angeles in April to prepare for the transplant, performed at New- York-Presbyterian Hospital on — no joke — Friday, June 13. Over the last five years, he said, kidney disease had

slowly sapped him of strength, put him on dialysis and threatened his life. Thanks to a gift from his brother, and with help from old friends around the country and new friends in Riverdale, the former resident of Brooklyn and Queens is now in recovery.

On June 26, he sat carefully on a couch in his place on the second floor of a west-ofparkway building, and cracked jokes with his brother as if he had never experienced what he describes as the worst five years of his life fighting kidney disease.

But a little over a year ago, while he was doing improvisational comedy at a casino in southern California, things didn’t look so bright.

“I started to get out of breath on stage, and, you know, I’m still performing, but in my mind I’m panicking,” Mr. Alexander explained. “So I asked the waitress, could you get me a glass of water, and until you bring it I’m not going to say anything.”

The crowd at the casino thought his rapid, deep breaths were part of his act.\

“The audience was laughing because they thought I was getting madder, but I was trying to catch my breath,” he said.

He was able to catch his breath, get the glass of water, finish his act and go home. But the next morning, he couldn’t lift his laundry from the washer to the dryer.

“I had no strength at all,” he said.

He went to the hospital for emergency dialysis on Dec. 14, 2007. With his lungs filling up with fluid, doctors raced to insert tubes in the only part of his body they could access easily.

“I had tubes sticking out of my neck,” Mr. Alexander said. “I looked like Frankenjew.”

He had been on the list for a new kidney since the previous July, and 10 other friends — plus two strangers — had already volunteered their organs. His brother wasn’t a perfect match, but he was the best one.

Rabbi Drelich said the decision to donate wasn’t hard once his wife, Debbie, was on board. Having gone through with it, he said, he’d encourage others to consider becoming donors.

Ms. Drelich isn’t surprised.

“He’s a guy who does all sorts of random acts of love and kindness for a whole lot of people,” she said.

But she admitted that her acquiescence came despite serious worries.

“There was a part of me that was really concerned to see my healthy, athletic husband go through a major medical procedure,” she said.

Mr. Alexander and Rabbi Drelich couldn’t say enough about Ms. Drelich’s sacrifice. A social worker who runs an assisted-living facility at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, Ms. Drelich became the advocate for her husband and brother-inlaw, and is still negotiating the obstacle course of insurance rules and medical jargon that come with surgery.

Though Mr. Alexander will take medication that weakens his immune system twice a day for the rest of his life, and will have to avoid crowds as a result, the worst seems to be over. Ms. Drelich says her husband is probably about five weeks away from getting back on his rollerblades — Rabbi Drelich says it’s closer to three weeks now — and Mr. Alexander is about the same amount of time away from being able to get out of the house.

The family has help from several friends in Riverdale, as well. Since Mr. Alexander came to the neighborhood, he says, he feels he’s been adopted by Riverdale’s Jewish community. “I cashed in on my brother’s bank account of friends,” he said.

Mr. Alexander says he doesn’t really know how to respond. As someone known for playing fund raisers and helping younger comics get gigs when they’re low on cash — and a staple on Jerry Lewis’ Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon — spending time on the receiving end of this kind of kindness is a new experience.

“To receive the gift of life, it’s the ultimate gift,” Mr. Alexander said in thanks. “There’s nothing more than the gift of life. Maybe a new car, a nice European one, nothing American. But the gift of life, I don’t know how to accept that.”

Rabbi Drelich said his decision to donate his kidney was as much for himself as it was for his brother.

“I’m just very selfish about the whole thing,” he said. “I just want my brother around.”