EPSTEIN o@ca.on.grey_county.owen_sound.the_sun_times 2007-08-18 published
BEACOCK,
Hazel (née
SMITH)
Of Wiarton passed away at Wiarton Hospital surrounded by her
family on Friday, August 17, 2007 in her 95th year. Cherished
mother of Lorna (Francis)
EDMONSTONE of Sauble Beach and Diane
(Geoff) EPSTEIN of Waterloo. Special grandmother of Lisa (Steve)
ASHTON, Greg (Anita)
EDMONSTONE, Scott (Shannon) Edmondstone,
Graham EPSTEIN and Jordan
EPSTEIN and great-grandmother of Tyler
ASHTON and Blaise and Savana
EDMONSTONE.
She will be sadly missed
by her sister-in-law Clara
SMITH of Lion's head as well as many
nieces, nephews and her many special Friends. Hazel was predeceased
by her husband Norman, parents Sarah
(McARTHUR) and Patrick
SMITH,
brothers Alf, Charlie, Angus, Patrick (Tiny) and Bill and sisters
Kathleen EBEL,
Stella
BRANNICK and Ellen
HEPBURN. Visitation
will be held at the George Funeral Home, Wiarton on Sunday, August
19, 2007 from 2: 00 to 4:00 and 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. The funeral
service to celebrate Hazel's life will be held at the funeral
home on Monday, August 20, 2007 at 11: 00 a.m. Interment Bayview
Cemetery. Donations made to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, Canadian
Cancer Society or charity of your choice would be appreciated
by the family as expressions of sympathy. Condolences may be
sent to the family at www.georgefuneralhome.com
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EPSTEIN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-07-17 published
She was a 'marvellous example of commitment to the public good'
Even as a teenager growing up in Montreal, she possessed a hatred
of intolerance, writes Sandra
MARTIN. It was a theme that later
wove through the many disparate parts of a hugely complicated
life to embrace politics, the arts, health care, social justice
and human rights
By Sandra MARTIN,
Page S8
Blunt, buoyant and bountiful, she was always known as Bluma.
A dogged fundraiser and networker, she had a flinty sensor for
injustice and intolerance, a lifelong love of the arts and a
passion for fixing things, people and the world.
Irreverent and possessed of a wicked sense of humour, she loved
to say that her husband, Bram
APPEL, made the money and she spent
it. A friend once said the Appels were involved with everything
but racehorses; Ms.
APPEL shot back: "Bram says you can lose
more on plays." On their 25th wedding anniversary, Mr.
APPEL
gave his wife a spectacular ring, but she, with his permission,
took it back to the jeweller and spent the money on a play, instead.
"He's lucky I didn't ask for extra money," she joked.
"She wanted to help society, but I can tell you this," Ms.
APPEL's
elder son, David, said yesterday. "If she had gone into business,
anybody who backed her would have made a fortune. She knew everybody
and she could get into any door, but she used all of that for
philanthropy or to support interesting cultural causes."
A non-conformist, Ms.
APPEL "created spaces and places for herself
where she didn't have to compete with others," said long-time
friend and colleague Patrice Marin Best. "But I also believe
she was gifted with a kind of foresight or intuition. Because
she was curious and she read very widely, she was always picking
up snippets of things and thinking about how they fit together."
"She was very effective," former federal politician Marc Lalonde
said yesterday, commenting on the breadth of the causes and issues
she supported. "She could not see a problem and remain indifferent
to it. She was a marvellous example of commitment to the public
good."
Her father, Jack
LEVITT, came from Vilna, Lithuania, and her
mother, Dora, from Kovna, Russia, probably around 1905 as Jewish
emigration from czarist Russia surged because of wide-scale repression
and fear of pogroms. Her father, who made a living initially
selling photographs on Montreal street corners, went into the
textile business and eventually formed a prosperous company called
Town Hall Clothes. The youngest of four children, Bluma (which
means flower in Yiddish) grew up in a hard-working, socially
conscious environment in Outremont.
She learned French at a young age (and later mastered Spanish
and Italian), and was Friends with a young Pierre Trudeau. She
was also involved in the same little theatre group as Herbert
Whittaker, the late theatre critic of The Globe and Mail.
She went to high school in Montreal but never attended university.
In a speech to the Canadian Club in April, she said she had refused
to take the entrance examinations for McGill University in 1936
because, "being Jewish, I needed straight A-plus to qualify."
Since B-minus was good enough for anyone else, this struck her
as unfair. So, even as a teenager, she possessed a hatred of
intolerance, a theme that wove through the many disparate parts
of a hugely complicated life that embraced politics, the arts,
health care, social justice and international human rights.
In 1937, she was introduced to a young chartered accountant named
Bram APPEL at a hotel in the Laurentians, north of Montreal.
He had a canny head for numbers and a good eye for investment
opportunities. Because he had trouble finding a job, he started
his own company, then helped to found a high-tech firm based
on the clean filtration systems invented by scientist David Pall,
a friend from his student days at McGill.
The APPELs married on July 11, 1940, and had two sons, David
(1941) and
Mark (1944.) As a young wife and mother, Ms.
APPEL
made a career out of volunteering. "I learned early on you enter
every door open to you," she said in her Canadian Club speech.
"A locked door particularly intrigued me and I never gave up
looking for the key."
Growing up, said David, "our home was filled with laughter and
intense discussion." He described his mother as a dynamo. "The
passport into our home had nothing to do with your station, but
whether you were interesting and what you brought of yourself.
It was an incredibly febrile and exciting environment. You take
it for granted, but, in retrospect, you see the extent to which
our mother and father enriched our lives."
Although she was drawn to the creative process, her prodigious
energies and talents did not reside in the making of art. She
said that, after six months of piano lessons when she was 6,
her teacher begged her not to come back; at 13, she joined an
after-school painting class but all her attempts at figurative
work turned into abstracts. As for acting, "I couldn't even get
a part in a mob scene." For a time, she tried identifying and
supporting the creation of various art forms by becoming part-owner
of Waddington's art gallery in Montreal in 1957 and producing
plays in the 1960s in New York City, including a short-lived
off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Maids and Olympia
Dukakis's first play, The Opening of a Window.
Her real talent lay in fundraising. There are four crucial steps,
she liked to explain. "First, you decide on your victims." And
then you stalk, encircle and entrap them. In a typical campaign,
she would begin by appealing to her "victim's" better nature
and, if that didn't work, would quickly switch to "fear, greed
and guilt."
When she was on the prowl, she never limited herself to one project
at a time. In 1955, she was in Geneva to help her husband run
the booth for Pall Corp. Filtration, which was exhibiting at
a commercial venue, and dropped in at the first Atoms for Peace
Conference in an adjoining building. There, she just happened
to meet physicists and Nobel Prize winners Isadore Rabi and Sir
John Cockroft, who, among other eminent scientists, had gathered
to try to chain nuclear power for peaceful purposes.
In the mid-1960s, the
APPELs moved from Montreal to Ottawa (although
they always kept a home in their native city) so Mr.
APPEL could
take a position as executive assistant to Jean-Luc Pépin when
he was the minister of energy, mines and resources in Lester
Pearson's last Liberal government. During their Ottawa years
- the APPELs moved to Toronto in 1979 - she worked for secretary
of state Gérard Pelletier at $1 a year.
That connection led her, in 1970, to Marc Lalonde, then principal
secretary to Mr. Trudeau. After granting her a 15-minute interview,
she showed up in her mink coat and hat and pleaded her case to
have the prime minister attend a dinner to launch the American
Friends of Canada, an organization that persuaded wealthy Americans
to give works of art to Canadian museums in return for a tax
credit. She had inveigled David Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Armand
Hammer to sit on her board. Ms.
APPEL ran overtime and Mr. Lalonde
showed her the door. "I was probably the first one to ever kick
her out of an office," he said yesterday. Seeing how flummoxed
she was, Mr. Lalonde organized another meeting and they became
fast Friends.
In 1972, Mr. Lalonde ran for office and became secretary of state
for the status of women and quickly appointed her as his personal
representative at the usual fee of $1 a year. Her big push was
to have women on the boards of directors of the major banks.
She would walk in with her mink coat and hat and would argue
with bank presidents, Mr. Lalonde said yesterday. "She could
give better than she could receive… Lo and behold, slowly, the
banks started appointing women and, a few years later, it became
a point of honour for them to appoint women."
In 1979, Ms.
APPEL ran unsuccessfully for the Liberals in the
federal election. She then moved to Toronto with her husband
and took on the rest of the country. Always one to sense an issue
that was about to develop into a crisis, Ms.
APPEL became deeply
involved in the community of activists that banded together in
the 1980s to found the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research.
Her lifelong love of music and the theatre prompted her to invest
heavily in terms of time, energy and money in the Toronto theatre
scene. She was a big supporter of the St. Lawrence Centre for
the Arts, which named one of its theatres in her honour in March
of 1983 after she made a donation to help renovate the 876-seat
theatre. She was also a significant force behind Opera Atelier.
In June of 2005, the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts
gave Ms. APPEL an honorary Dora Mavor Moore Award "for her exceptional
and lifelong dedication" to the performing arts in Canada.
About two years ago, she began to feel unwell. But, with her
characteristic verve, she carried on as though nothing were bothering
her. In June of 2006, Ms.
APPEL, the woman who had never attended
university, was given an honorary degree by the University of
Toronto. The severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic in Toronto
in 2003 had focused Ms.
APPEL's attention on nurses and their
vulnerability in caring for infectious patients, so she donated
$350,000 to help the Faculty of Nursing establish a Clinical
Simulation Learning centre within the new Health Sciences Building
at the U of T's St. George campus.
When she was named Canadian of the Year at a luncheon at the
Canadian Club on April 30, she appeared with a neck brace and
spoke with a raspy voice. Although she was never a smoker, she
was diagnosed with lung cancer in May. Ms.
APPEL took the opportunity
of the Canadian Club award to speak out against Islamist extremism
and to plead for open dialogue among Arab, Jewish and Muslim
communities. "Let us return to a time when tolerance was not
shrouded in silence born of great fear, but of loud and raucous
debate, born of great hope."
Last month, she was given an honorary degree by Brock University
in St. Catharines, Ontario Here's the advice she gave the graduates
in her convocation address: "Stay curious. Don't make the same
mistake twice, life is rough - it is a battle for turf - so learn
by observation - take notes - write memos. Listen to opinions
but not to the opinionated. Do not tolerate intolerance. Cherish
the environment. Keep an open mind and stick to your principles.
And dream big dreams!" In closing, she told the students that
"the two most important issues we face are the deterioration
of the environment, and the increase in the number of extreme
fundamentalist groups."
Clearly, she was gearing up for another campaign, but, this time,
her seemingly impervious energy was felled by illness. About
10 days ago, she was admitted to hospital. That's where she celebrated
her 67th wedding anniversary, on July 11. Her husband swept into
the room with a bouquet of yellow roses, then sat by her bedside
holding her hand.
Bluma APPEL's birth certificate says she was born in Montreal
on September 4, 1919, but she always claimed 1920 as her date
of birth. She died of lung cancer in Princess Margaret Hospital
on July 14, 2007. She was either 86 or 87. She is survived by
her husband, Bram, two sons, five grandchildren, her sister Goldie
EPSTEIN of Montreal and her extended family. The funeral is today
at 1 p.m. at Benjamin's Park Memorial Chapel in Toronto.
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EPSTEIN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-10-30 published
EPSTEIN,
Maurice
In his 100th year, at home after a long and difficult struggle,
on Sunday, Occtober 28, 2007. Predeceased by his dear wife Esther.
Beloved father and father-in-law of Jean and Arnie
VERTLIEB and
Philip and Joyce
EPSTEIN. Dear grandfather of Tamara and Andrew
TEMES, Alana
VERTLIEB and Steven
KASTNER, Geoffrey
VERTLIEB,
David and Michelle
EPSTEIN,
Deborah
EPSTEIN and Aaron
FRANKS
and Sara and Mark
ARNSTEIN.
Beloved great-grandfather of Bayley
and Maxwell
TEMES,
Jeremie,
Joshua, and Jamie
FRANKS, and Ryan
and Jake ARNSTEIN.
Service at Steeles Memorial Chapel (350 Steeles
Avenue West), on Tuesday, October 30th at 12 p.m. The family
expresses its deepest thanks to Dell, Gemma and Reg for their
devoted and loving care. Donations to the Soldiers of Israel
Fund will be appreciated.
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