Remarks by John Sheehy, Reed '82, for the Reed College Board of Trustees

 Moshe’s involvement with the Reed community began as a child growing up in Eastmoreland. Many of the college’s founding faculty lived in the neighborhood, and Moshe not only spent time at their homes playing with their children, he also witnessed them in their element at the soirées Moshe’s parents held at their house.

As his parents were also connected to progressive circles across the country, Moshe was exposed to all manners of political and social activists who passed through Portland.

Unlike the Ivies and many other liberal arts colleges at the time, Reed did not impose quotas on the number of Jewish students it admitted. That drew students from around the country, especially the east coast, enriching what was otherwise largely a regional student body. At the Lenske family home, Jewish students found a welcoming reception for Sabbath and Jewish holidays, a tradition that Moshe and his wife Hilda later continued.  

Moshe grew up attending lectures and events on the Reed campus, and swimming in college’s outdoor pool during the summer. After graduating from Lincoln High in 1943, he enrolled at Reed. In his second semester he was drafted into the Army and deployed to the European front, where he participated in the Battle of the Bulge.

After his discharge, Moshe returned to Reed a different man—someone described him as “having the ethos of a European public intellectual.” He also found Reed a different place, thanks to the large infusion of veterans enrolled on the GI Bill.

During this transformational period for the college, Moshe served as a critical bridge between war-seasoned vets and students fresh out of high school. He was, in a sense, a community standard bearer: someone able to explain how the values of Reed came to be, why things were the way they were, and how the college could adapt with the times moving forward.

It was a role Moshe would play at Reed for the rest of his life. He intuitively understood the interconnections and underlying principles of the Reed community.

A philosophy major, Moshe possessed an insatiable curiosity and intellectual passion that expressed itself in questioning and debate. It’s no surprise that as a student he co-founded the Reed Union debating society, facilitating debates between teams of students and professors over the thorny political issues of the day.

After Reed, Moshe moved to Israel for three years, where he worked as a journalist and met and married a young English professor from Scotland named Hilda Gabriel. The two settled back in Eastmoreland, where they became deeply engaged in Oregon politics and local art circles. Moshe took a job with the Western Toy Manufacturing Company, eventually taking the company over, and Hilda became a designer of the company’s stuffed toys collection.

But Moshe’s primary passion was community service. “We are social animals,” he liked to say. “It’s almost expected that we would be community-minded.”

When it came to Reed, he was the consummate community networker, maintaining his lifelong friendships with Reed professors in Eastmoreland, entertaining students at his home, showing up regularly for Reed alumni meetings, and over the years serving as president of the alumni board, an alumni trustee, and president of the Foster Scholz Club.

Moshe sought out interesting people wherever he went, exemplifying Reed’s core value, that of inquiry. He delighted in engaging others with his sharp wit and mischievous sense of humor.

Portland Mayor Bud Clark, a Reed alum, described Moshe as having “statesman-like leadership and Mark Twain-like wisdom.”

I personally benefitted from that wisdom, first, as a student at Reed, when Moshe helped me navigate a controversial project at the college, and then later when I followed in his footsteps as president of the alumni board and a member of the Board of Trustees.

“Keep your mouth shut,” he advised me, “until you could read the room.” Pearls of wisdom.

Moshe’s knowledge of Reed was especially critical during the Reed Oral History Project, as only he could provide the nuanced context we needed in interviewing Reedies who had graduated back in the 1920s through the 1950s.  

Moshe understood that Reed is a community wrapped in human memory—memory shared through stories, traditions, commemorations, and sadly, memorials like this one today. Those memories provide us with a sense of continuity in this place many of us consider home.

Reed was always home for Moshe. A community standard bearer, he demonstrated by his living example the roles and responsibilities we all share in maintaining this unique community.