{"id":2880,"date":"2021-06-17T07:35:01","date_gmt":"2021-06-17T11:35:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uhmc.ca\/staging\/7921\/?p=2880"},"modified":"2021-06-23T09:42:24","modified_gmt":"2021-06-23T13:42:24","slug":"devor-mary-blum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uhmc.ca\/staging\/7921\/devor-mary-blum\/","title":{"rendered":"DEVOR, Mary Blum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Date of Death: June 16, 2021<\/span><\/p>\n

Funeral will be held on June 17th, at 2:30pm\u00a0Graveside at the Temple Anshe Sholom Cemetery, 427 Limeridge Road East<\/a>, Hamilton<\/span><\/div>\n
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The family requests donations in Mary\u2019s memory to The Mary Blum Devor Unit for Children and Youth in Distress\u00a0<\/span>at the Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem.\u00a0 <\/span>https:\/\/www.canadahelps.org\/en\/dn\/4742<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Shiva will be held outdoors at 60 North Oval, Sunday, June 20, 5:00 – 9:00 p.m. <\/span><\/div>\n
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Please note:<\/strong> \u00a0In an effort to avoid the spread of the COVID-19 virus, graveside services will be limited to a maximum of 50 persons (including Clergy) for the safety of mourners, funeral home and cemetery staff.\u00a0 Masks must be worn, covering the nose and mouth,<\/strong><\/em> and social distancing 2m (6\u2032) is required<\/strong><\/em> unless you are of the same household.\u00a0 For those that wish to participate in the mitzvah of Kevura, gloves must be worn.\u00a0 Names and phone numbers will be requested.\u00a0 Thank you for your cooperation<\/span><\/div>\n
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On June 16, 2021, Mary Blum Devor died peacefully in her home, in Hamilton, Ontario.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u00a0Understanding 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u00a0Falling 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.\u00a0 \u00a0Appreciating 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.
\nHer work will reverberate to the corners of time.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Date of Death: June 16, 2021 Funeral will be held on June 17th, at 2:30pm\u00a0Graveside at the Temple Anshe Sholom Cemetery, 427 Limeridge Road East, Hamilton . The family requests donations in Mary\u2019s memory to The Mary Blum Devor Unit for Children and Youth in Distress\u00a0at the Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem.\u00a0 https:\/\/www.canadahelps.org\/en\/dn\/4742 . Shiva will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uhmc.ca\/staging\/7921\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uhmc.ca\/staging\/7921\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uhmc.ca\/staging\/7921\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uhmc.ca\/staging\/7921\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uhmc.ca\/staging\/7921\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2880"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/uhmc.ca\/staging\/7921\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2901,"href":"https:\/\/uhmc.ca\/staging\/7921\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2880\/revisions\/2901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uhmc.ca\/staging\/7921\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uhmc.ca\/staging\/7921\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uhmc.ca\/staging\/7921\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}