Murray Frum


Murray Frum was a Canadian real estate developer and philanthropist.

Biography

Frum was born to a poor Jewish family on September 3, 1931, the only child of Saul and Rivka Frum, who had immigrated from Poland the year before. Most of their family who stayed in Poland died in the Holocaust. His parents operated a grocery store in Toronto. Frum attended the King Edward elementary school and in 1950, graduated from the Harbord Collegiate Institute. In 1956, he graduated with a degree in dentistry from the University of Toronto. In 1970 he left dentistry to become a real estate developer and made his fortune developing suburban strip malls.
Frum was a collector of African art and donated over 80 pieces to the Art Gallery of Ontario, one of the largest in North America; and along with his son-in-law, Howard Sokolowski, built the gallery in which the collection is housed. He later expanded into Renaissance art. In 2007, he donated Bernini's 17th-century bronze of the crucifixion to the Art Gallery of Ontario which he bought while its origin was uncertain. Frum served on the boards of the Stratford Festival, the Canadian Centre for Advanced Film Study, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Personal life

Frum married twice. In 1957, he married 19-year-old Barbara Rosberg who would later become a CBC broadcaster; she died of leukemia in 1992. The couple had three children: David Frum, a journalist and a former speechwriter for U.S. president George W. Bush; Linda Frum, a Canadian senator who is married to Howard Sokolowski; and Matthew Frum.
His second marriage was to Nancy Lockhart. He died on May 28, 2013 at his home in Toronto of lung cancer despite being a non-smoker.