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The family requests donations in Mary’s memory to The Mary Blum Devor Unit for Children and Youth in Distress at the Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem.  https://www.canadahelps.org/en/dn/4742

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On June 16, 2021, Mary Blum Devor died peacefully in her home, in Hamilton, Ontario.  Mary’s parents and her three siblings immigrated to Canada from Poland in 1926. Mary was born three months later, in Montreal. The family was poor, but valued education. In time, all four children earned advanced university degrees.  Graduating from the University of Toronto with a Masters degree in Psychology, Mary specialized in child development, but set aside thoughts of a career when she married Sid Blum and started to raise a family. Sid was a human rights activist, and the two of them were part of a cohort of young idealists committed to fighting racism.  In the summer of 1966, Mary was told that her husband had six months to live. He was dying of inoperable cancer. With five children to feed, she knew she would have to get a job. She was 39 years old.  She began working as an unpaid volunteer, doing testing and psychological assessment of children in the care of the Catholic Children’s Aid Society in Hamilton, Ontario, where she lived.  Soon the Hamilton Board of Education, hearing of her work, asked her to do assessments of children having problems in school. As word of her effectiveness spread, she was offered a full-time job as a child psychologist at Hamilton’s Mental Health Clinic for Children and Adolescents. Now family court judges began asking her to assess children caught in custody battles. And before long she was named Chief Psychologist, and then Director, of the clinic.   Understanding that troubled children need someone who will listen to them, and care about them, Mary started a program in which she taught volunteers how to listen to children with empathy, and nurture their self-worth. Each volunteer was assigned one child, and given weekly counselling in groups that she led.  Four nights a week, after coming home to have dinner with her own children, she drove back downtown to work with existing volunteers, and to train new volunteers. In this way, hundreds of ordinary citizens learned how to listen to, and care about, Hamilton’s troubled children.  As the benefits of her programs became evident, she was able to open a second clinic for children’s mental health, and place it in one of Hamilton’s poorest areas.   Falling in love in 1979, Mary married her second husband, Berko Devor. A year later, she tearfully resigned from her work at the clinics in order to, with her new husband, spend half of every year in Israel. There, after mastering a new language, she immediately began working with children in a hospital in Jerusalem.   Appreciating her value, the hospital offered to pay her. But instead of accepting payment, she asked the hospital to set the money aside, so that each year, they could hire an additional staff person to work with children.  After the death of her second husband in 1993, she returned to Hamilton. Here, in the house that she’d bought thirty years earlier, she continued working, doing marriage counselling and family therapy in her home, and over the telephone with clients in Canada, Israel, and the U.S.  Dying at the age of 94, Mary Blum Devor is survived by her children, Helen, Leonard, Lilly (Blume), Jack and Reuven, their spouses Heather, David, Sharon and Tova, and her step-daughter Tzvia, loving nieces and nephews, as well as fifteen grandchildren, thirty great-grandchildren, and hundreds of people whose lives she changed.
Her work will reverberate to the corners of time.