General Information

Full Name: Ruth Hyman
Date of Death: Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Ruth Hyman, our family matriarch, passed away peacefully at the age of 103. Born on January 2, 1921 just after women gained the right to vote, Ruth witnessed global transformation in unfathomable ways across more than a century, and embraced every change with equanimity, wit, and rhinestone bedecked clothes.

Ruth’s long walk through this world began without the conveniences and rights we often take for granted today: ballpoint pens, refrigerators, televisions, and computers; penicillin, contraception, commercial flight, and women’s full financial independence. Through the Great Depression, Prohibition, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Space Race, and the Digital Revolution, Ruth not only lived amidst the tumult of the times with grace—she also thrived. She contributed her time to Hadassah, her energy to her family, her doggedness to trips to the flea market, and her smarts to many games of canasta, bridge and Scrabble.

An athlete born to a culture that hardly celebrated athletic women, Ruth was often recruited to be a fifth in
her son’s backyard basketball games in her younger life in Englewood, New Jersey, or found floating for what seemed like hours on her back in the pool in her later one in Boynton Beach, Florida. After taking up golf in her 60s when she moved to Concordia in Cranbury, NJ, she nonchalantly sank two holes in one. Her stubborn spirit and physical gifts kept her on her own two feet until late into her 90s and driving her own electric chair through her building’s halls (much to the chagrin of her neighbors at Cedar Crest) longer than anyone else might have.

But perhaps Ruth’s most legendary quality was her talent for spinning a well-constructed story. Whether recounting tales of life with her Eastern European immigrant parents and three siblings in 1930s Jersey City, NJ or her global travels to Africa and Asia, she relished a great punchline. It was not until later in life that her children learned about her well-concealed skill delivering a spicy joke.

A colorful woman herself, Ruth loved things that sparkled, like her voluminous collection of orange carnival glass, or her penchant for matching her watch and shoes for even a trip to the grocery store. Her mother’s shimmering flapper dress from the 1920s hung on a mannequin in her front hall for decades, a simultaneous metaphor for her love of bling and her love of family.

Ruth cherished her familial bonds above all else, taking every opportunity to “suggest” that we stay in close touch with each other despite life’s distractions. She lived this creed herself as the glue binding multiple generations of extended family together over many years, especially as her peers dwindled. She missed her husband of more than 50 years, Mervin, every day of the almost 30 years she lived without him. She may have outlasted her sisters, Estelle and Naomi, and brother Irving, but her many tales of their childhood together will surely outlast her, as they live on in everyone she’s left behind.

Ruth is survived by her children, David Hyman (Ellen) and Linda Hyman Carey (Dwight), her grandchildren Rachel Carey Newmark (David), Lisa Hyman Sackman (Joel), and Lauren Hyman Kaplan (Doug), and her seven great-grandchildren, Matthew, Jacob, and Zachary Newmark; Slater and Truly Sackman; and Lola and Ryder Kaplan.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that those wishing to honor Ruth’s memory do so by calling a relative they’ve not spoken to in a while, or by making a donation to Jewish Family Service of MetroWest New Jersey or the American Diabetes Association.