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Jeff Bergman PureCare President

PURECARE PRESIDENT JEFF BERGMAN:
A 20-Year Commitment To The Seena Magowitz Foundation

When Jeff Bergman’s father received his pancreatic cancer diagnosis back in 1985, he faced limited options and a grim prognosis. Now, decades later, options for pancreatic cancer patients have progressed – but they’re still nowhere near where they need to be.

Seeing a close friend and colleague lose his own mother to pancreatic cancer – and then launch a research-focused charitable foundation in the days that followed – gave Jeff the inspiration he needed ramp up efforts of his own. Thus began a nearly 20-years-and-counting commitment to helping find an eventual cure for one of the world’s least-researched and most underfunded forms of cancer.

“I’ll never forget when Roger’s mom passed,” Jeff said, referring to Seena Magowitz Foundation Founder Roger Magowitz, who he met during their time operating competing bedding industry businesses in Virginia Beach, Virginia, in the early 1980s. “Right away, he did something about it. I went to his first Seena Magowitz Foundation Golf Classic and thought to myself, there’s someone who makes a difference.”

In 1989, Jeff left Virginia Beach for Arizona, where he came vice president of the Spring Air mattress company. Soon after, Roger expanded his business into Arizona, and the two had a chance to reunite out west.

In 2009, Spring Air sold, and Jeff partnered with Arnold Hershbain and David Hershbain in PureCare, a health and wellness-focused supplier of mattress and pillow protectors (then called FabricTech). Arnold’s former partner, Sam Chase, had been a friend of Jeff’s until he, too, passed from pancreatic cancer. Seeing the potential in the business, Jeff invested in it and became president, ultimately helping expand it into an international health and wellness top-of-bed industry leader.

As PureCare grew, so, too, did the company’s contributions to furthering the fight against pancreatic cancer. It became one of the Seena Magowitz Foundation’s most prolific financial supporters in the years that followed, sending its associates to play in the Foundation’s Annual Charitable Golf Classics, making major sponsorships and donating products for raffle prizes and similar fundraising efforts along the way.

Jeff, his son, Sean Bergman, PureCare’s Chief Operating Officer, Arnold, and Arnold’s son, David , PureCare’s Executive Vice President, joined other company executives and associates in making regular appearances at annual SMF events. There, they met Dr. Daniel Von Hoff and other pancreatic cancer researchers from the Translational Genomics Research Institute. The team at TGen receives funds from the foundation it uses to continue medical research on pancreatic cancer detection methods, treatment options and more.

“We try to do whatever we can to further the work of the foundation,” Jeff said. “Roger knows he can count on us – and call us – at any time, and for anything.”

Jeff also understands the value in genetic testing as a means of assessing one’s potential predisposition to certain cancers. He underwent testing himself following his dad’s battle, but tests didn’t reveal him to have any particular cancer risk factors.

PureCare: Strong Advocate Against Pancreatic Cancer