Jay Moskovitz

Chestler: The first thing I’m going to ask you, Jay, is to tell me about the facts of when you born, where, who your parents were.
MOSKOVITZ: I was born in the Bronx, New York City, on November 29, 1950. My parents had come to the United States after World War II, both survivors of the Holocaust. My mom was at Auschwitz. My dad was in the Hungarian army and doing other things that I don’t know about. As I said, they survived the war and got back to their hometown.

Chestler: Which was where?
MOSKOVITZ: Near Usti nad Labem in Czechoslovakia. A few months later, in August of 1945, they were married in, I’m sure, a very small and probably hippie-ish ceremony with a few friends and family. Against lots of advice, my mom very much wanted to get pregnant and did, even though she probably wasn’t very healthy or strong, but had my sister just a year later. With the help of family and friends already in the United States from before the war, they were sponsored and enabled to come across to the United States in 1948. Apparently, they had a wonderful cruise coming across.

They arrived in New York City in 1948, and family helped them a lot. My dad had been the manager of a lumberyard in, I think it was maybe Prague. I’m not sure. He probably had a very good life and some good skills, but in the United States, even though he spoke some English, his skills weren’t very important, so he worked in a meat packing plant. Probably in New York City, probably in the meat packing district where, according to my mom, he put on muscles in his arms and his neck. But it was hard work, and he was close to 40 already. He was in his late thirties, young but not that young. As I said, I was born in 1950, two years later, in the Bronx. We lived there for the next six years in what was a very nice middle class neighborhood in the Bronx, near Grand Concourse, near Jerome Avenue.

Moved out to LA [Los Angeles] — to follow the Dodgers out to LA[laughs] — a year later and spent my childhood in West LA, the Fairfax neighborhood, the Jewish neighborhood of LA. Got to go to Disneyland once a year, and one glorious summer we went there twice because we were hosting family from New York. And finally I grew tall enough to drive the cars [in the Autopia ride at Disneyland].

Chestler: What type of work did your dad do when you got to LA?
MOSKOVITZ: His older brother had a small liquor store in East LA and wanted to sell it to his younger brother and move on to other things. My dad, with my mom’s help, started running this little liquor store in East LA. Like a lot of immigrants, it took lots of time, energy, but not that much English. They made a living, I assume. A few years later, during a robbery, he was shot in the back.

Chestler: In the store?
MOSKOVITZ: Yes. During a robbery, some kid with a shotgun. Luckily, it turned out, he went to LA County General, where they had a lot of experience with gunshot wounds. He had some incredible medical care and surgery and they saved him. But my mom was pretty adamant about selling that store soon after. It was a liquor store with some groceries, like a small Seven-Eleven with whiskey, which was under fair trade back then in Los Angeles, so supermarkets couldn’t sell it. He bought a small store in Santa Monica, California, which was fun, but it didn’t go that well. He worked hard, then finally ended up buying a third store — one at a time, not at the same time — in West LA not too far from our house, where they worked hard for the next dozen years or more and made a decent living.

Chestler: So both of your parents worked in the store?
MOSKOVITZ: My dad did most of the work before he was shot, but after he was shot my mom had to do stuff. She had driven a little bit on the streets but had to learn how to drive the freeways of LA overnight and did, apparently, and survived. You needed the freeway to get to the store. So they worked together, worked hard. My dad got better slowly. My sister, in these years, got married and fairly quickly had three wonderful daughters.

Chestler: What was your sister’s name?
MOSKOVITZ: My sister’s name is Sylvia. She was, as I said, born in Europe in 1946 and came over when she was two. She spoke — as a two-year-old, and a bright kid, I’m sure — Czech, but on the streets of New York that wasn’t well received. Apparently, a short time after she was in New York, the kids made fun of her. She went upstairs and told her parents she would never speak Czech again and never did [laughs]. So she learned English, which was good because my parents were absolutely never, ever, ever going back to Czechoslovakia and wanted to become, as they called themselves, Yankees. Not the baseball team, but Americans. So learning English was good. It was my native language. They had learned some in Europe and learned a lot over here by reading comic strips and just learning it slowly.

English was the only language my sister and I learned, while my parents could speak right in front of us in either Yiddish or Czech or Hungarian, or little bit of German, because they wouldn’t teach us any of that and didn’t want us to learn it. They had a good arrangement. They would switch languages. If we looked like we were understanding some of the Yiddish, they would switch languages mid-sentence and jump into Czech, or worst of all Hungarian, which nobody knows how to speak. Hungarian. Family was good to us and took care of us very well. In 1968 my sister got married, and again, had three wonderful daughters who now have their own kids, living in California.

Chestler: Did you have any kind of Jewishness in your household growing up?
MOSKOVITZ: My parents, like a lot of Europeans as far as I know, for my family there were more-or-less Orthodox synagogues, women in the back, everything was in Hebrew, lots of old men shuffling back and forth.

Chestler: This was in LA?
MOSKOVITZ: This was in Europe and then being carried into LA. Around Fairfax then, you could find easily numerous small synagogues and shuls that were various flavors of Orthodox, which we went. That was it. My mom kept kosher at home. We had two sets of dishes, then two more small ones for Passover. My dad didn’t care that much, but it was mom’s house, mom’s kitchen anyway.

Chestler: Did you go to religious school?
MOSKOVITZ: Yes. My sister did not, in the Orthodox tradition — then, anyway — but bar mitzvah was absolutely expected, and so I started going to a religious school.

Chestler: On Sunday morning?
MOSKOVITZ: No, every day after school I walked about a mile, when it was safe to do that, down the infamous Melrose Avenue to a small shul, something Israel. I can’t remember it now. I had a wonderful teacher, a really nice man with a class of maybe ten other boys like me studying for bar mitzvah.

Chestler: Was this right before you were 13, or . . .?
MOSKOVITZ: No, for several years. Four or five years, I guess. I didn’t like, it but I liked him, and it was absolutely clear to me that I had no choice [laughs].

Chestler: Did you learn Hebrew well?
MOSKOVITZ: Learned to read Hebrew only. This was Orthodox, again, so no Torah for the bar mitzvah boys, Haftorah only. I learned, memorized and probably have still in my head somewhere, the prayers, the long bracha [blessing] at the beginning and the end of Haftorah. I learned to the point of memorizing my Haftorah portion, although I couldn’t tell you what it was today. Had the service in that shul. I remember I was very nervous. I think I made one small error, and some of the old men started yelling at me or just yelling in general. But I managed to work my way through that and finished the thing.

My parents, of course, were very proud, and then I was given the reward of a big party the next day, with two girls, I think, that I could invite. My sister was taking the SAT that morning on Sunday, and she was going to be late, and it was very important, and everyone knew that. She came in — my sister had a very nice figure, and she was very pretty — she came in wearing this bright red dress, off the shoulder, and she looked spectacular. It was like a Hollywood entrance. I don’t think she minded, but I don’t know if she was trying to steal — maybe she was trying to steal my thunder. I’m not sure. It’s a very clear memory. My sister walking in like Hollywood with this bright red dress and looking fantastic. But I had a great time.

Chestler: Did you continue with Jewish school afterwards?
MOSKOVITZ: No. I’m not sure anyone I knew did. So at 13, got that done. I think I was involved with the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts a little bit, which I liked. My dad worked too much, so he was not available for much of the Cub Scout or Boy Scout activities. My mom came, which was nice, and other moms too, but it would have been nicer to have a dad there. Camping out was new to me. I liked it a lot.

But fairly soon I discovered there were girls around, and they were interesting [laughs] — and scary. My sister and I had been fighting like brothers and sisters for a long time, and she had been bigger than me, and so she had been kicking me in the shins for years. About the same time, I grew and we became the same height so that the kicking pretty much stopped, which was nice. More importantly, I realized that I had a resource in the house besides my mother, who I would never talked to about girls. I had a girl in the house. I had my sister. She became a good friend. She was really helpful to me.

Chestler: So did you . . .?
MOSKOVITZ: You want stories? How many more stories do you want? We could be here all day.

Chestler: I want to know . . .
MOSKOVITZ: So no more Jewish education. My dad had gotten shot just a year before, but the family supported him. We bought the house that we lived in West LA, not far from CBS and Farmers Market. My dad recovered. There was no more Jewish stuff then.

Chestler: So high school?
MOSKOVITZ: Fairfax High. I knew Gloria, my wife, from junior high as an acquaintance.

Chestler: What was her maiden name?
MOSKOVITZ: Gloria Halper. That’s her name still. We got to be a little bit of friends in high school, still acquaintances. Both ended up at Berkeley later, and that’s where we started dating.

Chestler: So that’s where you went . . .?
MOSKOVITZ: High school was great. This was high school housed with mostly New York Jews.

Chestler: New York Jews in Fairfax.
MOSKOVITZ: In LA. I believe for some time, maybe a year or two, we had among the highest average SAT scores in the country because we were children of crazy people, overachievers. At that time, Fairfax Avenue was really very nice. My mom would shop there. There were two or three butchers, two or three bakeries, two or three vegetable stores, mostly kosher. An active lively shtetl, but in the nicest of ways. I would walk with her and stuff. She’d go shopping almost every day for fresh produce and meats and bread, whatever. It was all fresh. The bread, of course, was mostly rye bread. My mom would make challah. It was Jewish that way, Jewish culturally. I have no memory of seeing a Christmas tree, literally, except on TV. I knew what they were, but they were not around, even though I’m sure there were Christians.

Chestler: So it was pretty much a Jewish neighborhood.
MOSKOVITZ: It was ghetto in a nice way, or shtetl in a nice way. I knew that, but I didn’t think about it. It was cozy.

Chestler: You said you went to Berkeley?
MOSKOVITZ: Right. Needed to get out of that crazy house. That’s not fair. It sounds mean. Both Gloria and I had difficult households, parents with problems, separately. We both knew and needed to get on with our lives after high school. Gloria moved out in LA, and I moved to San Francisco, to Berkeley. I couldn’t tell you why. I probably didn’t know why. It was fun. It was exciting. But it was necessary for me to move out.

Chestler: When did you graduate?
MOSKOVITZ: 1973, in four and a half years.

Chestler: So it was at the height of the . . .
MOSKOVITZ: It was after free speech. Mario Savio had left, and then came the Vietnam protests and lots of tear gas, People’s Park. And a lot of fun, maybe too much fun, for me [laughs]. But a lot of fun, a lot of people, made friends, became more or less an adult.

Chestler: Were you active in any of the protests?
MOSKOVITZ: No. I was just running away from the tear gas, which everyone did on campus. I had a lot of fun, actually. I worked as a barista, before it was called a barista, on Telegraph Avenue. And I’m still friends with my Persian co-worker.

Chestler: By that time, during undergraduate school, is when you and Gloria got together?
MOSKOVITZ: Started dating more. Did we live together? Yes, we lived together off and on. Gloria was already focused on being a teacher but had family problems back in LA. So she went back both to try to help out her family and to finish up her education, got her teaching credential and some student teaching done down there. I thought I was going to med school, didn’t get in, and then had no other real plans. For no other reason, I went back to LA, probably to see Gloria and probably because I wasn’t sure what I was doing. We started dating, lived together. We made it permanent by getting a dog together.

I started working in a small shop. It was a part-time job. An old Hungarian man, who had come over in 1956 when you could get out of Hungary, opened a small shop on the infamous Melrose Avenue, General Phonograph. It’s long gone now. He had no kids, adopted me, loved my mom because she spoke Hungarian. She was very friendly. So I worked there for four years learning how to fix stereos and things like that. It was very lucky. He didn’t need the money, I don’t think. He would hang out schmoozing and had coffee with friends most of the day. I was doing work and he didn’t mind if I blew things up occasionally. He taught me a lot. It was fun. I learned a lot from him.

Chestler: That would have been in the mid-’70s probably?
MOSKOVITZ: Yes. ’73-ish to ’77. Gloria finished student teaching. We were happy together, both really wanted kids, and realized we absolutely did not want to raise them in LA. So we looked for a place to move to. She had finished school . . .

Chestler: Did you get married?
MOSKOVITZ: Not yet.

Chestler: Okay. Go on.
MOSKOVITZ: We were in a committed relationship. We looked around. The West Coast seemed good. We had already been to the Bay Area, so we ended up in Portland, which felt very, very small in 1977. The city ended literally at 82nd Avenue. On the east side, there were strawberry fields on 82nd Avenue. It felt very small, very cozy. Life was good. Got a second dog. Gloria had studied special education; that was part of her degree. She got a part-time job very quickly at Maplewood right near Carol’s house here, which got is income. That got us stable. I opened up a shop in January of ’78 over in inner Southeast because there was already a shop on the West Side, and my brilliant business sense told me to go on the East Side. Opened a small shop on 31st and SE Division — and waited.

Chestler: What kind of shop was this?
MOSKOVITZ: It was electronic repair. Inner Sound was the name. Stereo repair, electronic repair, fixing electronic things. Like my father, I’m a tinkerer and had learned electronics in LA from George [Ilish?]. Anyway, I opened the shop and we were pretty settled. We decided we should get married. But our family and many of our friends were still down in LA, so we arranged to have a wedding in my folks’ backyard. My dad was still alive in that year. The good news was that they had a lovely house, but the backyard was normal size. We could only fit in about 60 people. My mom had a hundred friends that she wanted. It came down to 20 of her friends, 20 of our family, and Gloria and I got 20 people, I think. It was nice. It was July 2, 1978. The weather was perfect in LA. A couple of friends offered the music. We didn’t know a rabbi, so we went to meet one, and he came to marry us. It was a lovely wedding in a beautiful, simple backyard for 60 people with food and stuff.

So back to Fairfax — this is a side note. Forgive me. We lived in Portland. We had nothing down here. I didn’t have a suit. We needed things. We came down a few days, maybe a week early, and my mom marched up and down Fairfax Avenue demanding good service. We found shoes that we ordered and got delivered. I found a suit that she had altered within two days because my mom demanded it from one of her friends. It felt like a . . .

Chestler: She sounds like quite a character.
MOSKOVITZ: She was a character. It felt like some kind of low-level mafia thing, walking around, my mom collecting favors. It all worked. It all came together. The rabbi did an okay job. My parents had a trellis covered with bougainvillea, which was our huppah. It was very pretty. We stayed for a day or two and came back to our lives in Portland, living in North Portland in a rental house that we ended up buying in the next year.

Chestler: Are you in that house now?
MOSKOVITZ: No. We lived there for about 15 years. Two kids were born there. Then finally we filled it up and found a beautiful, bigger house over in North Portland in the Piedmont neighborhood where we still live, that we like very much.

Chestler: You settled in Portland. How and when did you hear about Havurah [Shalom], and how did your involvement with Havurah begin? What brought you there?
MOSKOVITZ: Good question. Gloria was raised in a Jewish family of sorts but with little if any actual activities or observance. She was Jewish, she lived in a Jewish neighborhood, but nothing more than that, I think. I had what I described, a slightly Orthodox upbringing, which I was never going to recreate, didn’t like. I think like a lot of people, until we had kids we didn’t think about it very much. When we had our wonderful daughter Sara in 1979 and then two years later our wonderful son Josh, we realized we wanted to actually have Jewish children. We went looking around, very casually. My dad had passed away already at that point. My mom came up, and we went shul shopping. I think we actually went to services at Neveh, at Beth Israel, at Shaarie Torah. I don’t remember if we went to Havurah. My memory was that they were meeting under the staircase at Mittleman. That may have been later. My mom, of course her preference was Shaarie Torah, which was relatively Orthodox back then. But for us it didn’t fit. Beth Israel had a beautiful building, which we all admired until the choir started singing. My mom’s head swung around a couple of times, looked at me, we both laughed and we got up and left. Not to knock Beth Israel, but it’s just not what we expected. It wasn’t part of our background. So mom left. Gloria and I a few years later realized we wanted a Jewish connection. I couldn’t tell you exactly how we found out about Havurah — still at Mittleman, of course — and went and felt wonderfully comfortable. Lots of young families, young kids. I’m not sure if Joey was there or not. He may not have been there yet, but he came soon after and geared himself to us and us to him.

Chestler: So would you say that you joined Havurah about ’85 or ’86?
MOSKOVITZ: Yes, roughly. Sara would have been maybe ten-ish, which would be maybe a little bit later. Maybe late ’80s would be more accurate.

Chestler: Joey came in July of ’87.
MOSKOVITZ: He wasn’t there when we started visiting at Mittleman, but he was there and involved when we joined and got more involved. I remember him very much involved with Shabbat school and everything. Joey was very much there, and happily for me and Gloria, involved with stuff. So yes, late ’80s, best I can tell you. We had made, certainly, some friends in the kids’ pre-schools in North Portland, wonderful people. There’s two to three families still friends, but the rest of our friends mostly are Havurah people, wonderfully and happily.

Chestler: Was this through the Shabbat school?
MOSKOVITZ: Absolutely. Joined the Shabbat school. Sara would have been around ten, and Josh would have been eight-ish. We fell into two wonderful classes that were two years apart. Several families in those classes had kids in both classes like us. Steve Goldberg and Linda Boise. Herman Asarnow and Susan Baillet. I’m sure I’m forgetting others. There are others. It was wonderful. We assumed this was normal. We learned later that not every class had jelled as well. They were all fine, but these were super-duper.

The idea back then was that parents only — with some assistance from Joey but mostly on their own — taught the classes. Initially it was one family per week, which was good. It pushed us to learn stuff, but it was a little bit intimidating. I believe Gloria, if not Gloria someone else, proposed a troika, a team of three families, to do three weeks, which was magnificent and was wonderful, and made everything better. Not necessarily easier but better because people brought in their different skills. Gloria brought in teaching experience beyond anyone else’s for the most part, and for example Steve Goldberg, among others, had wonderful Hebrew and Jewish knowledge. As a team, it was great. It geared us and bound us closer and happily together, and bound us to Havurah.

I remember my first — I went to a parent meeting. I believe it was Josh’s class, but it probably doesn’t matter. Maybe before school, maybe the next year. I forget whose house it was at. I arrived. Barbara Hershey, still a good friend who I love, was sitting there knitting. Kate Davidson, still a good friend who I love, was sitting there knitting. It was in someone’s backyard, most likely before the winter, in the fall. A beautiful backyard, two women sitting around knitting. It was like hippie heaven. I felt absolutely happy and comfortable and at ease, and I was treated well and welcomed and taken in, as was Gloria later. Shabbat school. That was it. We were involved. We went to High Holidays somewhat, but it was Shabbat school and the kids that were the focus and remained that way for some years.

Chestler: So eventually you got into the leadership. Can you describe how that came about?
MOSKOVITZ: Shabbat school. Back then Joey was the only staff person as rabbi. Joan Liebreich was a few years later in our office.

Chestler: That’s quite a few years later. She came in ’95.
MOSKOVITZ: Yes. So Shabbat school had a committee head, and it was always difficult to find people because these are all families with kids whose lives were very full, hopefully happy but very full. Gloria and I offered to be committee heads of the Shabbat School Committee. It ended up being two years, which we enjoyed a lot because we were working with a lot of our friends and the bureaucracy was pretty minimal. It worked out well. It made us feel connected and good. We were able to help guide the Shabbat school in little ways. Through that I got a little bit to the leadership, the Steering Committee, as a liaison of some kind.

Chestler: Probably a liaison from Shabbat school.
MOSKOVITZ: The Steering Committee, most likely. Not much, but it was a nice connection of sorts. I think in many cases, even now, it’s hard to find people willing to be treasurer as volunteers. [Inaudible name] had been doing it for the two-year commitment, and someone asked me to do it, and I said sure. I became treasurer. I believe the first year was under Lou Jaffe and Kathy Jaffe, who I believe were the first co-presidents. They did an excellent job. I was able to take Rich’s [Eichen] wonderful reports and make the font bigger, for which Lou is indebted to me to this day. Rich was great, but he made very small spreadsheets. Of course, I got to know a lot of people, wonderful people, the leaders of Havurah back then.

So two years on the Steering Committee and I felt good about what I was doing. Then Layton Borkan, I believe, was scheduled to be the next president. Her mom had gotten quite sick, and she needed to spend a lot of time in North or South Carolina taking care of her mom. Out of desperation, I was asked to be president, but only agreed if I had two therapists with me, which would be Carol Chestler and Layton Borkan, to ease the pain and to keep me sane. The three of us, I believe, had a great time. After my turn, I believe it was Layton’s, and then Carol came in as the home-run hitter. We worked together joyfully, spent a lot of time over the same great table here in Carol’s beautiful kitchen, with Sy helping us out trying to convince ourselves and the congregation to buy a building.

Chestler: I want us to spend a lot of time on the building. But before, let’s just give some timeframes. As I recall, you were president from ’95 to ’96. They were one-year terms. Layton Borkan was ’96 to ’97, and I was ’97 to ’98. Those three years represent how Havurah got involved in going from homeless . . .
MOSKOVITZ: Nomadic!

Chestler: Yes, nomadic. Let’s talk about the culture back then, the doubts about a building and how that fermented, why we needed a building and why some people were so against it. Could you elaborate a little bit?
MOSKOVITZ: Our Friday night services were mostly in the Mittleman [Portland Jewish Academy] chapel, a very cute, delightful little room which was big enough for us. Any larger events, which of course were bar or bat mitzvahs and perhaps weddings, although I don’t know about those, were held in the Mittleman [Mittleman Jewish Community Center] auditorium before they remodeled it some years ago. It was not beautiful, but it was there, it was ours, it was a Jewish space.

Chestler: It was ours to rent.
MOSKOVITZ: I’m sorry. It was ours to rent, of course. Which meant setting up and unsetting up every event. Somehow I ended up doing the sound. I set up the sound system, ran it, and then took it down after every bar and bat mitzvah. I don’t regret it. It was a lot of work. The High Holidays were there in the same auditorium for a number of years with a bigger sound system that we had to set up, at times with my wonderful employee Fred Van Sant, a lifelong musician and a very soothing influence on me during moments of stress during High Holiday sound feedback. Mittleman was delightful, but we were visitors, we were guests. I believed they treated us decently and fairly. We paid them rent and stuff. We were growing . . .

Chestler: And they were growing.
MOSKOVITZ: They were growing. I believe there was some gentle pressure to move out. I believe it was gentle. It may have grown [laughs]. And like a family that wants their own home, if possible — the congregation is a big family, and we wanted our home. This had been talked about for some years. But the fear was that it would make us too institutional, too status quo, too normal. But there was a lot of strong feeling for it among the membership. I believe Margie Rosenthal was, prior to my presidency . . .

Chestler: Was it Bob Liebman?
MOSKOVITZ: Bob Liebman had been president. Before him Margie Rosenthal was president. She, I believe, was a strong supporter, and then Bob became one, and a leader in Margie’s case, for a building for us. I have to suspect that her husband Elden Rosenthal may have been against it in terms of changing Havurah from what he and I think a lot of people wanted desperately to maintain, which was a coziness and intimacy that was an important part of it for all of us, I think.

Margie started looking for buildings, and then Bob started looking for buildings, and then soon after I became president and was out of town on vacation, other people found our building. Pamela Webb, who was an architect and member of Havurah — this is past tense sadly because she has since passed away — she was hoping to find a building near her home in inner Northwest and thought it was a great idea. She found for us these two very ugly buildings that at first sight were very ugly, concrete slabby things. Two buildings — one bigger, one smaller — on one property. My family and I had gotten back from vacation, and she showed it to me. I walked around watching the water drip through the roof, surprised at her choice.

But she was a visionary in many ways and described to me the building that we were going to have, and it was beautiful. She helped us hire a friend of hers, Richard Brown, the architect, for the building because she wouldn’t take on that job for us but was an advisor throughout the process. She held my hand and everyone else’s hand for the next few years while we tried to convince ourselves: 1. it was do-able; 2. it would be much more beautiful than it was then; and 3. that we could afford it. The process was that, with Pam’s advice most likely, and others’, we remodeled the larger of the two buildings for our sanctuary and office space with the expectation absolutely to remodel and add in the second, smaller building.

We spent a year with lots and lots of spreadsheets, and Carol and her husband Sy Chestler and Layton and other people convincing the congregation that we could afford this, without a mortgage. We had a member, I believe, who was a fundraising expert, whose name I can never remember, who met with some of the leadership and said, “This is the way you raise money. You go to the richest person and get the biggest donation, and then you pyramid down, and that’s how it’s done.” We said, “That doesn’t sound great. It doesn’t sound like us. She said, “Well, that’s how it’s done.” We said, “Okay. Thank you.” And we met again and realized it wouldn’t work for Havurah, we thought.

Chestler: Why wouldn’t it work?
MOSKOVITZ: Because it required a couple of things. It required our identifying the richest members of the congregation, which was against our socialist general nature, and it required competition for donations, which was against our socialist nature.

Chestler: Could you say more about “our socialist nature”? I don’t know that everybody would . . .
MOSKOVITZ: Okay. Socialist. Communal. I imagine there are other words. I can’t think of them. Definitely egalitarian, Maybe that’s the best word. Egalitarian. I think there was a socialist aspect in a communal sense, that we were all equals, we would contribute what we could.

Chestler: It wasn’t about who was rich.
MOSKOVITZ: It was absolutely not. That was the absolute and immediately obvious, I think to all of us, deal-breaker on this traditional — and implied only way — to fund raise. I think we’d all known about that and probably had been involved with other fundraising activities. But it was obvious from the get-go that this would not work for Havurah, that people would be angry and some would leave. It was clearly wrong for us, and it was nice to feel that clearly and easily. I don’t remember any dispute over that whatsoever.

We said, “Thank you for your advice. We’re going to do it our way.” Which was an unknown way. The emphasis was two-fold. Absolute anonymity. One person, which turned out to be the infamous Sy Chestler, would be the only one who would know the donations. We had to keep track of them, of course, but no one else would know. So total anonymity as to name and amount. The other absolute goal was to get as many people as possible to donate anything to this fundraising, which is what happened. We went looking for the most wonderful member of the congregation and found Mimi Epstein to be the head of fundraising, which she agreed to do, and we formed the Fundraising Committee.

Chestler: What that during your presidency?
MOSKOVITZ: I believe it was. I remember some people. We discussed it among ourselves and came up with a rough plan, which included literally one of us going to every member’s house to talk with them and ask for nothing except their involvement. We were shooting for the highest percentage or maximum involvement . . .

Chestler: Ask for nothing?
MOSKOVITZ: Ask for no money at the time. It was not a schnorring [begging] visit; it was a request for the biggest donation they could afford. We needed their money. I don’t remember asking for commitments at that time. If I’m wrong, I would agree, but my feeling was that the reason I did it is that I hated the idea of begging even for something like this. I had no problem asking for money for this activity, this thing, because it was wonderful to me to ask people for money, not for me of course, for the building and for Havurah and for our future. There may have been a commitment; it’s been a long time. But it was fully anonymous. There was no signing of paperwork, no write your number down and I’m going to negotiate how much you can afford.

Whether or not there was actually a dollar amount or not, I don’t recall, but absolutely more importantly to me was the rest of it. “We want your involvement. We want everyone involved. We want this to be a Havurah fundraising event, and not a rich person’s fundraising event.” And it worked! In two ways: we got people to donate a lot of money, and we got people to donate more money, in some cases, to act as the mortgage for the building. A couple of dozen families I recall, maybe 25 or 30?

Chestler: I think at one point it was maybe 40, but it varied.
MOSKOVITZ: A wonderful small group of people that could afford it put up separate additional money as a loan, as a mortgage to Havurah, to avoid the thing that most people did not want, a mortgage in a bank and the threat of foreclosure or loss of the building. I’m sure we were unusual to the point of being unique, perhaps around the country. Unusual for sure, to be our own mortgage holders and fundraisers. And the anonymity of all this, I have no doubt, was wonderful and unusual, perhaps to being unique. I don’t know.

Chestler: It worked out, but at the time it wasn’t really easy getting everybody to participate. Figuring out how to convert these ugly buildings into plans that would make sense. We had a lot of congregational meetings, every Sunday practically . . .
MOSKOVITZ: Felt like it.

Chestler: So you could talk more about that?
MOSKOVITZ: Sure. We had Pamela Webb, who was an architect, and was at many of these meetings with our architect himself, Richard Brown, who is still in business and a wonderful man, incredibly patient with us. A former member Jeff Cole, who was a building engineer with wonderful smarts, able to help us walk through. I remember Jeff particularly helping us accept the numbers. I had never done anything like this, nor had most of the people in the leadership, and the numbers kept going up. Richard Brown gave us his best estimate, but there were always small changes, perhaps from us, perhaps from problems with the building. So the numbers kept going up, which was of course frightening. I don’t remember any disputes or any problems. He had some brilliant ideas for the design. My memory is that it was straightforward for him with his skills to create a two-step remodel. As I said earlier, the main building, the chapel and some office space — which got us into our own building, which was very exciting — with a simple wall to be taken down between the main building and the added-on building.

We had lots of meetings about all this. I’m sure we lost some members, who saw this, as I said earlier, as too institutional, too status-quo, too normal. But we gained members, slowly at first, and I know many more later, because we became more established and more visible, as opposed to being a nomadic group of wonderful people at Mittleman. I don’t remember any worries or angst, particularly over the design. There were certainly questions, and I’m sure complaints and stuff, but it was a nice, simple design. Size-wise it felt great. Yes, it was certainly difficult and bumpy. The money part, which was what I was involved with, with Carol and Sy a lot, was the hurdle, trying to explain to people how we could simply afford this without killing ourselves. Between the mortgage, which was more straightforward and a smaller group of people, and the donations of our membership of 150 or so families . . .

Chestler: No, it started out at 200 when we started.
MOSKOVITZ: Was it that big already?

Chestler: Yes.
MOSKOVITZ: Okay. Still a small group. 200 families, I believe roughly 600 people with kids and stuff, it’s a small group. And we ended up raising . . .

Chestler: $2,000,000. A little over.
MOSKOVITZ: $2,000,000. It was crazy thing, which was wonderful! If someone had said that at day one, I would have run away. I would have said, “You’re nuts, “ and I would have run away. The number grew because we were paying interest to our mortgage holders, both for legal reasons and for ethical reasons.

Chestler: They were more like a loan rather than a traditional mortgage.
MOSKOVITZ: Exactly. It was a loan to replace the mortgage. Absolutely. I was calling it a mortgage. It was loans. And we absolutely wanted to, and did pay, a fairly good interest rate, all planned out and expected and agreed upon. In many cases, the interest was donated back. In some cases or many, the loan was donated back generously by these people. The donations came in. I don’t believe it was a 100 percent, but it was in the high 90s, 95 to 97 percent. Some wonderful but crazy number, an amount of participation way beyond what I think fundraising ever gets from any group, religious or not. For me, absolutely by far the most inspiring part of the whole thing was that we did all this, and as I said, we did it anonymously. I still think about it. I talked about it for years. Not for me but for us. I was happy to be involved with it, but it took everybody to do it.

Chestler: So you talked about sitting around this kitchen table with Layton and myself and you.
MOSKOVITZ: And Sy.

Chestler: Sy sometimes, yes. My recollection is that we would meet on Shabbat, on Saturdays, and plan for the next morning’s congregational meeting. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that went?
MOSKOVITZ: I’ll try. The memories are old and vague, but actually wonderfully good. The memories are roughly the following. Layton, who I love dearly, is totally a process person. I am, roughly speaking, the opposite. I just want to do things and talk about it, if at all, later. Carol was wonderfully able to control both of us, guide us, smooth us over a little bit, and show us the middle path, but help us all use our perspectives and end up with a single path. We obviously came in with our own personalities and expectations and fears. With a lot of help from Carol, all three of us pulled the stuff together.

Chestler: And because we had to sell this to the congregation, and it was a constant updating. The people in Havurah were not about to let us just do it. They wanted to know exactly. So talk about that.
MOSKOVITZ: I remember spending so much time here with you and Sy. Happily, but lots and lots of time. I think spreadsheets, not to be too geeky about it, because to me they were the best way I could imagine to show people what we were doing, to show a flow of money.

Chestler: So how did the spreadsheets happen? Who did those?
MOSKOVITZ: As far as I know, I did them. I’m a spreadsheet geek [laughs]. I use them at work. As I said earlier, they stand as a flow chart, in a different way. We tried to use the flowchart to show how the money would come in over time, over months and years.

Chestler: When people donated money, sometimes they didn’t pay it all in the beginning.
MOSKOVITZ: Correct. Some people were able to pay upfront; others paid over time. As far as I know, everyone paid. I don’t know if there were any people who did not keep their commitment, which of course was also incredibly comfortable and comforting, just a wonderful feeling. So the money was coming in over time . . .

Chestler: Three-year increments.
MOSKOVITZ: Right. So that was part of the need to show the money flow. As I say, it was sort of a cross between a spreadsheet and a flowchart. To show the money coming in and to show the money going out, and to show that in fact it was do-able. We needed to pull money from the operating budget, which we did, carefully, and explain it to a group in which, as smart as Havurah has always been, there were very few accountants or bookkeepers or people who knew or used or particularly liked spreadsheets, which looked like, as they are pretty much, the tool of the geeky. But they were and can be useful to show the flow of money coming in and going out over time. So we spent a lot of Sundays with updated spreadsheets, if there was any news. It was generally good news. I don’t remember any bad news. The costs, as I mentioned earlier, seemed to be creeping up on the remodel, but never anything that stopped us.

Chestler: But you had to show on the spreadsheet how it was still do-able because there were people who were skeptical that didn’t want us to get in over our heads.
MOSKOVITZ: Absolutely.

Chestler: Nobody wanted us to get in over our heads.
MOSKOVITZ: Right. That was the fear of all of us, I think, perhaps more so for the leadership because we were the ones leading the people over this potential cliff. That was actually in the front of our minds throughout the whole process. And for me, and I hope for others, the spreadsheet helped clarify that. That’s probably why I started doing this, to find a way for myself to look at and try to understand this flow of money coming in, and then the expense, in large amounts, from my friends and neighbors. So it needed to be clear and accurate. And with enough eyes looking at it and asking questions, it seemed to hold up well, if not very well, as a tool for most people to understand this flow of our money.

Chestler: I would just editorialize that I do think that the spreadsheets were in fact critical. They helped people see in black and white that we were doing things responsibly and conservatively and not going out on a limb.
MOSKOVITZ: I would agree totally. I certainly felt proud of it then and now, and again, I think running it past you, Carol, Sy, and Layton, and [inaudible name] sometimes, but just even the three of us, which I remember a lot, being cautious, as you say, and careful, knowing this would be going out to a bunch of non-financial, non-accountants. But it was their money; it was not our money by any means. It needed to be as close to crystal clear, almost boringly clear, and simple as possible. So I agree with you, not that I take credit for it, but it became a useful tool.

Chestler: You should take credit for it.
MOSKOVITZ: Well, I’m proud of it, but as part of the process, as part of the team.

Chestler: The thing was that not only did we have to do this for two sets of fundraising for the first building, we had to do it a third time in order to make the addition with the second building and close off the space and make it into one building. And every step of the way, we had to figure out a way to continue to ask people to re-up their pledges because the original money wasn’t going to cover it.
MOSKOVITZ: That’s true. I’d forgotten. I’d assumed that we had budgeted for, planned for the first building. That was our main step at first. I don’t remember those secondary steps; maybe I wasn’t involved as much. But for all of us, certainly for me, the first big hurdle of the initial fundraising for our first and only building was to see it as possible. That was the goal. Our membership responded wonderfully with donations, and then second donations and mortgages. I think we had a second round of loans, that I’m calling mortgages. We had to for the second building.

Chestler: Definitely.
MOSKOVITZ: A lot of the same people either continued or stepped up. It brought out among the best of Havurah in that sense, in the logistical view of the world.

Chestler: Yes. Talk about how it brought us together even more strongly as a community, this shared adventure, project.
MOSKOVITZ: Both are good words. It was that. Again, I don’t know — maybe you could — I can think of a couple — very few people left, sadly, but it was not a complete surprise. Despite our conversation, their image of what Havurah was becoming, or might become, was not what they wanted, so they left. But a small number.

Chestler: And we got new members.
MOSKOVITZ: We go a lot of new members afterwards. We became slightly institutional, slightly more visible, and perhaps more credible, or legitimate, to the greater Jewish community. In some ways, I sense we went from being a nomadic, hippie community to a real congregation with a real building. The view that we grew up a little bit is probably true.

Chestler: We even invited community members to a meeting at Havurah and then asked them for money. We had a community campaign.
MOSKOVITZ: That’s right.

Chestler: And we raised thousands of dollars that way.
MOSKOVITZ: Again, my memory — but I can’t imagine anyone being against our success. I guess there’s a small possibility that some people from Beth Israel were concerned about another synagogue being so close. That, I assume, was trivial and unimportant. In general, I have to assume the Jewish community was happy to see another congregation, as kooky as we were or appeared to be at the time, to be successful and permanent and solid and grow the Jewish community in Portland in a good way.

Chestler: We were the first new synagogue in a building in Portland in about 40 years.
MOSKOVITZ: Since Neveh, I would guess.

Chestler: Yes.
MOSKOVITZ: Because Beth Israel was old, and Shaarie pretty old too, and both in town. Again, a good point, that we were kooky but legitimate.

Chestler: Why don’t you talk more about kooky?
MOSKOVITZ: Okay. I believe we were more liberal, progressive, open-minded.

Chestler: That’s kooky?
MOSKOVITZ: I mean it in a good way. I don’t mean it in a bad way. I mean that we were younger. I suspect we had an average age younger than a lot of the congregations, which can be good and bad. We had less maturity, perhaps, but more flexibility or adventurousness. I think for a lot of people, we felt we were creating a new kind of shul — not that different, I guess, but a little bit different enough — to fit us.

Chestler: I would say very different, at least at that time.
MOSKOVITZ: Yes. That’s fine. I have no complaint with that. But it felt good. It felt like we were creating something, and that, for most people, feels good. We didn’t appeal to people who wanted something too organized, too institutional, too status quo-ish, but we also wanted to be legitimate and real. We had a real rabbi, and then real staff and then real worries, for our new building, when the roof started leaking later.

Chestler: We opened the first building in ’98, so it’s almost 20 years ago. So what do you think about the building? How has it worked out?
MOSKOVITZ: Perfectly, it seemed liked. The huge majority of the congregation was supporting it. Few left. It was, not quite miraculous, but it was spectacular. For a lot of the people, including me, it felt like we had just built our own new home for our big Havurah family.

Chestler: Does it feel homey to you? Did it?
MOSKOVITZ: Yes, very much homey.

Chestler: What makes it homey?
MOSKOVITZ: It is as we wanted. It’s pretty simple. It’s human-sized, a fair amount of wood. Richard Brown, the architect, I think did a great job fitting it to our group, our personality. It’s small enough to feel good. Activities blossomed with our own space. It was so much easier to have an event. Prior to this, we either had to rent space at Mittleman or try to squeeze it into someone’s home, if it was small enough, or find other space, like at Friendly House. Which are all very nice spaces, but dancing around and arranging space here and there, not feeling settled in our own space because we didn’t have an “own space.” Now we had our own space, and as far as I know activities blossomed. We filled up the space, especially the second building when it was done, with classrooms and activities during the week. Anything you wanted to do, we could do there. It was like a clubhouse, I think, in the best of ways. It was our clubhouse.

Chestler: So it has kind of any informal feel to it? It’s not stately or . . .?
MOSKOVITZ: Absolutely. Informal is a very good word. Again, I think size, the feeling of it that Richard Brown gave to us with his design. The wood, the windows. Keeping the wonderful bow-truss roof of the old building, the beautiful wooden arches that he wanted to and was able to keep.

Chestler: You mean in the sanctuary?
MOSKOVITZ: In the sanctuary. The beautiful, old, curved wooden structure that holds up the roof, strengthened and painted, of course. There’s definitely an old feeling to that part of the building, and a simple feeling to the rest of it. A nice courtyard that Richard was able to create for us, carve out for us. The entrance. There’s a medium-size gathering place to sit outside. He joined the building together with a wonderful skylight structure to let it in light. Yes, very comfortable. I love it. I still like it very much. I love being there. I feel tremendously good about being a small part of it.

Chestler: That’s great. Let’s move on to the here and now for Havurah. Some people feel the building is bursting at the seams. How do you feel about that?
MOSKOVITZ: I don’t know. My understanding is that, for the most part, happily and sadly, it’s the Shabbat school. We seem to be doing very well and growing. As a side note, many churches and synagogues, perhaps most around the country, are shrinking, and we’re growing slowly but steadily, I believe largely through our Shabbat school, which I think is traditional for us at Havurah, including myself and my family. It brings in young families, most of whom stay.

Chestler: The same system is still basically in place, that the parents are the teachers, even though we have an educational coordinator.
MOSKOVITZ: Yes. I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s humbling, in a good way, for parents. It shows their children that the parents are able and willing to learn new things, even though they’re perhaps nervous, to be knowledgeable without being experts or pretending to be experts. So yes, I think the Shabbat school is the best part of us, a very, very important part of us in pulling in new people, hopefully for the long term. But the other side of that coin is space. As far as I know, we rent some classrooms a couple of blocks away at a church.

Chestler: We used to. Now it’s at the Metropolitan Learning Center, which is a big, old school. MLC.
MOSKOVITZ: It’s close enough to walk?

Chestler: Yes, the kids walk.
MOSKOVITZ: Because given our rainy weather, leaving the building, to me, is not ideal. I think most people, including you, would love it to stay in the same place and use the same building. So needing more space is, again, a mixed blessing for me. Good news, bad news. Good news for the students and all the growth there. Bad news for needing the space. I’m not involved at all with Shabbat school and so I haven’t heard the thoughts. I imagine there’s some conversation, I don’t know whether serious or not, about adding on a second story or space to our building. I don’t know if that’s even possible. The idea of moving is sad enough to think about. Looking for a bigger place would be expensive beyond belief, I’m afraid, anywhere in the city itself, and moving out to any suburb in any direction, I think, would be difficult for some of the members.

Chestler: Yes. Where does our population come from, would you say?
MOSKOVITZ: I like to think it’s pretty broad and spread out, but I don’t know. I haven’t kept track of that. It’s certainly not neighborhood. There are very few people that live in that neighborhood to speak of. My understanding would be Portland proper rather than Beaverton-Gresham-suburb people, but I don’t know for a fact.

Chestler: I think that we have maybe more people living in Northeast/Southeast Portland than in West Portland, but there’s a balance. So our location works for — it’s central.
MOSKOVITZ: It is central. It’s wonderful. And the price of anything now anywhere in the central city is outrageous and probably unaffordable to us, I fear. It would be very expensive. It would be very difficult. Wonderfully, our building is worth a lot of money now.

Chestler: When we bought the two buildings, we paid $350,000.
MOSKOVITZ: Right. So it’s worth a lot of money now. And Pam Webb knew that even then. That was part of the reason she encouraged us to buy that property, because she knew it was going up. She believed light rail was coming in, as it did a block away.

Chestler: Streetcar.
MOSKOVITZ: Yes. On Lovejoy. And obviously, inner Northwest has gone nuts, like a lot of the city. So we have a lot of value, equity in that building. Yes, the complication of looking/finding/moving/remodeling again . . .

Chestler: My God!
MOSKOVITZ: Money [laughs]. I believe Carol and I, and Layton, might pass on that adventure. Not to help, but not to be leaders. That worries me for Havurah in the medium-to-long term. We’ll see.

Chestler: What about — you’re now grandparents.
MOSKOVITZ: Just say alter kockers [loosely translated, “old farts”]. A triple grandparent.

Chestler: Do you think that there might be a Havurah intergenerational thing in your family?
MOSKOVITZ: I don’t know. That’s a very good question. We’re a two-synagogue family. My wonderful son-in-law and his family — Lee Feldman is his name. His parents are Howard Feldman and Jen Feldman, wonderful people. Jen is a senior staff member [Development Director] of Beth Israel. They’ve been members as a family for many years, I believe, and that is their synagogue, although I don’t believe Lee has spent a lot of time there. I have no doubt in my head that Havurah would fit them better. It fits a lot of young couples better, I think.

Chestler: And why is that?
MOSKOVITZ: Because we’re kooky [laughs]. We have a kooky aspect, let’s put it that way. Open. Flexible. Very much oriented to young families and young ideas. And again, I suspect, hopefully in a few years from now, or at least when the kids get closer to — these are two boys, two grandsons here — when they get closer to anywhere near bar mitzvah, I believe they’ll get that and — of course, all of us will support their joining any synagogue. I think all the grandparents, who are all here in town, hope they join a synagogue, and I believe they will. We’ll have to have a discussion, or maybe many discussions, on whether they go to Beth Israel or Havurah, or somewhere else, although I don’t think it would be anywhere else.

I think that my wife Gloria and I have stronger emotional connections to Havurah Shalom than, I think, the Feldmans might to Beth Israel. It’s certainly a wonderful place, and as I said, Jen works there. I’m not sure their emotional connection is as strong. We’ll see. Interestingly enough, the wonderful assistant rabbi at Beth Israel, Rachel [Joseph], an incredibly sweet woman, performed our daughter and son-in-law’s wedding, and she did a great job. They’re still friends because they’re similar ages. I guess there’s a pull in that direction. I don’t know. But again, any synagogue’s better than no synagogue, and Havurah’s better than any others for me. We’ll see. Interesting.

Chestler: So we’re going to go through a big transition with Rabbi Joey retiring in a year.
MOSKOVITZ: And the governance remodel.

Chestler: So what do you think about that? Are you concerned, or are you excited, or . . .?
MOSKOVITZ: Possibly a bit of both. I’m Joey’s friend. I respect him. I love him. He’s an occasional camping buddy. He’s been the rabbi for me and my family for all of our time at Havurah, and for many people as well. We know him, his foibles, warts and all, and love him still. So there will be a change, and a change of feeling. It appears that it’s likely to be a woman, which I think would be a wonderful change.

Chestler: Why is it likely to be a woman?
MOSKOVITZ: In conversation with people, it seems to be a serious idea. Seriously in a good way.

Chestler: I didn’t know that.
MOSKOVITZ: Okay. It’s not me advocating this necessarily, one or the other. That’s the sense I’ve gotten from a number of conversations, and I thought it was an interesting idea. It will be a new rabbi an any case, an individual who’ll bring their own strengths or weaknesses to Havurah. Male or female, it doesn’t matter. It will be somebody younger than Joey, which I think will be good because they’ll bring energy and ideas, some good and some we’re not sure about yet. It’ll bring a lot of energy. I believe it may well entice more young families to come to Havurah with a younger rabbi. Joey has been wonderful, but I think a younger rabbi always entices some younger people, single or families. But this will be a new person. We’ll have to do a lot of dating of some kind. I have no apprehensions. It will just be a time of transition and getting to know each other, the congregation and this new rabbi. I think it’ll be good.

And the governance that was discussed and described at the last congregational meeting on Sunday looked excellent to me, much simpler. It felt like the bureaucracy, if you will, of Havurah had grown up and up to a bloated level. 18 is a large number of people on a steering committee, way too large for a meaningful discussion. Overlap, probably for years, between the Executive Committee and Steering Committee work. A lot of redundancy, discussing something at Steering Committee and then a week later at Executive Committee, or vice versa. Unclear lines of responsibility and guidance and stuff. So it looks like a handful of people did a great job redoing our structure. It’s on the web, by the way, the presentation, if you’ve seen it.

Chestler: Yes. I have to look at that.
MOSKOVITZ: The presentation with PowerPoint is on there, and it’s fairly clear, I think. There weren’t that many questions at the meeting. It looks like a great change and not scary. What I’ve found worrisome is the difficulty of having the president a volunteer.

Chestler: We don’t have a president coming up.
MOSKOVITZ: Debbie Nadel is staying on for her second year as, I believe, co-president, and she’s wonderful. Shelly Sobel finished her two years, and I believe there’s no co-president for Debbie right now, and perhaps more importantly, no vice president, which was to be the next president in the Havurah tradition of hierarchy. At the end of the meeting, Joey made a nice shpiel that we are a wonderful group and to think about it some more and step up. The group that was there, as is often the case at congregational meetings, was mostly older members — not old, but more long-term members, any of whom, frankly, could do a fine job as a leader of Havurah — and he was making it clear that Havurah needed us to step up. It was a nice shpiel.

Chestler: You stepped up once before when Layton had to bow out temporarily. You’ve done it once, you . . .
MOSKOVITZ: I could say the same for you. Sure, I thought about it for a minute, or maybe two minutes, and it won’t happen. I wouldn’t be very good, and I wouldn’t be very happy.

Chestler: Well, happy I can’t say. But good . . .
MOSKOVITZ: Thank you for the schmeer, but no. I like to think I fit a much smaller organization, and we’re much bigger now and feel much bigger to me.

Chestler: How big are we?
MOSKOVITZ: 380 families, or close to it. That was the last estimate, I think.

Chestler: Wow.
MOSKOVITZ: And again, if you multiply that roughly by three, you’re well over 1,000-1,200 or so members with kids and stuff, which is a great number. It is bigger. It feels bigger. It needs a better governing group, and a better, clearer hierarchy than I’m comfortable with. I’m happy to do a lot of things, but not that. I think the committee meetings would kill me. Actually, it would be nice to get somebody younger involved. As the phrase goes, “to grow leadership.”

Chestler: It’s always been a problem getting Shabbat school parents, who are already very involved with teaching in the Shabbat school, which by the way, only meets every other week on a Saturday, so it isn’t that it’s . . .
MOSKOVITZ: Oh, did that change?

Chestler: No, that’s always been.
MOSKOVITZ: I’d actually forgotten.

Chestler: It’s always been a problem integrating Shabbat school parents. Not at the very beginning, because everybody had to do everything in Havurah . . .
MOSKOVITZ: Oh, you mean long ago. Right.

Chestler: But now, and even in the last 15 or 20 years, it seems like it’s harder to get Shabbat school parents into either the main governance or committee structure of Havurah.
MOSKOVITZ: I agree. My memories, definitely strong, are that in the 20 years or so since we joined there seem to be two halves to Havurah, each one wonderful. The Shabbat school half, as you described them, wonderful families busy with their lives. In many cases, working parents. Kids, family, and just life for a young family. Pulling off Shabbat school, I thought, was wonderful, for myself and for everyone else. To add on extra tasks was not going to happen. And the other half, in many cases older people, able and willing and interested in more prayer, liturgical, and the governance of Havurah. It seemed to be a good arrangement; it seemed to work well. It was rare that people crossed over that separation. I felt that my kids were getting a little older, and my wife was wonderfully supportive, as were the kids, and I sort of made that change to the leadership, but it was ultimately rare.

But yes, I think we need to pull in younger people. It’s always important to get younger people with their ideas and their energy and their involvement.

Chestler: Very few, but some people over the years have talked about trying to keep Havurah small by closing membership. What do you think about that?
MOSKOVITZ: I understand the idea, and I think it’s terrible. I think it would destroy Havurah. I’m sure people would leave over that. It would start to feel elitist. I think that not being open goes against many of Havurah’s foundational attitudes and wishes and hopes and dreams. I can see that causing us to implode. It’s too bad there aren’t any easy answers. We are growing and the city is growing, and young people are coming to Portland and they’re having kids, and some of them are Jewish and they’re going to want a place to connect. We could be that place, a wonderful place, but we need to house . . .

Chestler: So maybe if we continue to find space for our Shabbat school, which really only meets about 25 times a year for two or three hours, maybe that’s the piece of it that we could to continue to rent and be able to stay in our building.
MOSKOVITZ: Sure. I think that’s possible. I certainly hope it is. I think it would be most people’s wish. We’ve got what seems to be a pretty comfortable situation.

Chestler: But parking.
MOSKOVITZ: Parking’s a pain in the ass, right? So we all need to get on our bikes like every other Portland person [laughs].

Chestler: I’m not allowed to ride a bike anymore. My son won’t let me.
MOSKOVITZ: I’m only kidding. Of course, that reminds us of our foolishness in terms of building apartments with no parking. No, we can’t solve parking. The danger there is that for a parking solution, we need to go to the suburbs and get a building with a big parking lot, which again, would damage Havurah. It would make us into a suburban congregation that we’re not It’s tough. A lot of this came up before, a lot of the same conversation, but on a smaller scale, and frankly, having found this wonderful possibility in a great location that became much, much better was wonderful. A small miracle, if you want to call it that. It would be much more expensive, and harder, to find a space.

Chestler: I wanted to ask you about yourself. You had a shop on Division. Do you still? Or what’s your life like now in terms of work?
MOSKOVITZ: I was able to retire after owning a small business for 36 years — happily, proudly — and absolutely ready to get out.

Chestler: When was that?
MOSKOVITZ: It will be three years in January. We have a wonderful daughter and her husband, who live in town and were kind enough to present us with a grandson at about that same time. He’s almost three, lives very close to us, and makes me smile just to think about him. So if you’re going to retire, I recommend having a grandchild nearby, if at all possible. It’s an amazing package of life.

Chestler: And now he has a brother.
MOSKOVITZ: Yes, two grandsons here in Portland and one New Jersey grandson, who is quite wonderful as well. We need to make a greater effort to know him because they’re far away and we can’t see them as often, but with Skype and FaceTime, we’ll certainly come close along with some visits — going there, coming here. My wife retired after 30-some years of teaching in Portland schools, perhaps six years ago now. She’s really happy with her retirement and our grandsons.

Chestler: Talk about your involvement with Habitat [for Humanity] and other, and your trips . . .
MOSKOVITZ: Okay. Seven or eight years ago, a friend, [Gerson Raboy?], a member of Havurah, was involved with Habitat for Humanity and was a co-leader of an international group going to Guatemala. Habitat for Humanity has two halves, but people don’t always know that, a huge US section building houses here in the US and a huge overseas part called Global Village building houses in dozens of countries around the world. So Gerson somehow let us know.

Gloria and I were thinking about traveling a little bit and looking for ways to travel, and we went along with Gerson and other people down to Guatemala and did a Habitat for Humanity building trip for two weeks, helping to build a small house for a family, and it was spectacular, humbling. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing and could only do the minimal tasks of shoveling, digging holes, and moving bags of cement around. But we were useful and did not complete but helped build a small house in a small city called Totonicapán in the highlands of Guatemala, and we loved it. We were able to arrange two weeks of travel, I forgot before or after, in and around Guatemala. My wife even then was speaking some Spanish, and we had a fantastic trip.

We got to know some of the staff in Totonicapán. There was a young man there whose name I’ve forgotten — sadly, I know his face but not his name — who was a volunteer, and my wife and I really enjoyed the trip. We did one more trip to Bolivia less than a year later, and took the training and became leaders of these groups. We then did approximately six more trips, two more back to Totonicapán in Guatemala, where the young man had become a staff member of the Habitat there in the town.

As a side note, wherever you go with Habitat overseas, there’s a local office with one or two local staff and some local volunteers who coordinate and guide your trip. You arrive there and they take care of you, set you up in a simple hotel and arrange transportation, food, everything, have already preselected a family and a house. You work two weeks with some time off, and in those two weeks, you will typically build roughly one-third of a house — the bottom third with a bit of a foundation, the middle third, or the most wonderful finishing third with roof and family moving in. We got to go to Malaysia, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Honduras, El Salvador, and had wonderful trips every step of the way. We were able to afford it financially at the time, spend time traveling in the country two weeks before or after. We had a great time. We haven’t done it in awhile for health reasons, but we hope to do it again.

Chestler: Wasn’t there a trip with a Havurah group?
MOSKOVITZ: Havurah Shalom got involved with a local NGO called Green Empowerment who had been involved with an NGO in Nicaragua for a number of years called Asafenix that did projects in Nicaragua. Green Empowerment arranged often groups of students, and so Gloria and I were down there also three times to this tiny village called El Jocote, approximately 40 families, 40 house, in the hills, where Green Empowerment, the local Portland NGO, working with Asafenix, the local Nicaragua NGO, helped to do what they both do, which is install solar panels, individual ones, in people’s homes, solar panels in fields to pump water from a well to fill up a cistern of 250 liters that’s used for farming, install some wind energy.

So Havurah, with a lot of work from Linda Boise, a long-term member, fundraised $40,000, as I recall, from members of Havurah to donate, through Green Empowerment to Asafenix, to pay for the village solar system of El Jocote, which meant digging a new well for clean water next to the old well, putting in solar panels, a pump in the well to replace the human energy of hand-pumping water up to these cisterns from which the gravity fed them down to a little faucet, for the first time ever, to every household in El Jocote. So now, instead of the women and teenage girls walking down the hill to the creek and schlepping 40-pound buckets of eight gallons of water on their heads — and damaging their shoulders and spines and energy levels and wasting hours every day — they can now turn a faucet in their kitchen and get clean, fresh water to cook and clean and reuse the gray water, as they have already, to create little vegetable gardens to improve their diets, with good fences to keep the pigs out.

And Havurah sent a group a couple of years ago of about ten energetic “alter kockers” to help build fences and do some work and just meet people, which is considered in some ways the most important thing that Habitat for Humanity does. Because the work we do is wonderful, but any ten-year-old there could outwork us. So you actually meet people and try to explain to them why you just spent $500, more than that now, to travel 1,000 miles from your home to help build a house for them, and then you go home. It’s incredibly moving both ways. For me, hopefully it counteracts some level of “ugly American” around the world. You’re actually humbled because there are always kids standing around, usually boys, and if they grab a shovel they simply outwork you, by no means showing off because they work hard. The men can work three of us without even trying. So it’s wonderfully humbling.

So Havurah has been involved with Green Empowerment and Asafenix and El Jocote for several years now. I think it’s going away, but not in a bad way. We’ve helped them in a lot of ways, and I think perhaps we need to move on to a new activity. Again, with no negative whatsoever, just a new direction for other people to lead in other directions.

Chestler: That brings up two questions. One is — I think you went with a Havurah group to Africa to do something? The other is to talk about the Tikkun Olam’s new project at Goose Hollow.
MOSKOVITZ: Yes. I would say ten years ago, Rabbi Joey was realizing that the congregation was getting older. As is often the case, the older people were less connected. Many of them were traveling, and doing service projects in many cases, or looking for a service project. He connected up with American Jewish World Service, largely I think through his friendship with Ruth Messinger. AJWS, I think, did some group trips, mostly with high school students, but as far as I know Joey begged Ruth to create, and AJW created a group, so ten Havurah alter kockers, including Joey himself and my wife and I, went to Uganda to do a project under the auspices of AJWS. We stayed at an orphanage compound, had a great time.

It was the first trip to Africa, I believe, for all of us, so seeing the poverty of Africa made any other poverty look trivial. We’re talking about no water, or dirty water, not enough food, torn clothes; everything you could think of to make life hard was what we see. The place we were staying at had food and water, and a bunch of orphans who were certainly afraid of these ten white people who came. We had small, like a hut, with a squatting toilet, I think in each one, and a bucket shower. In most cases two people. Gloria and I had one. We had people teamed up. The kids were afraid of us for a day or two of our two-week trip, but after they realized we were harmless, they did what they do normally. In the evening, they would sing their songs and do little dances and try to teach us — and failed — how to dance. They were great. We had a great time. We did a little bit of good work, and I think for all of us it was a moving experience.

That was after our very first Habitat trip, and for better of for worse, I think Gloria and I expected a Habitat-kind-of trip, which it was and wasn’t. With Habitat, you tend to work more of a full day, although you can stop and rest any time you want. This was more of a scholarly trip, I guess, so we worked a few hours in the morning and then studied Torah and did other things in the afternoon, which disappointed me and bother me, actually quite a bit at the time. We had two wonderful leaders, a young man named Pesach and a young woman whose name I’ve forgotten, who I realized after a few days were really more experienced at working with high school students. So our activities in the afternoon felt like high school activities. It was sincere, but they felt a little bit childish. I wasn’t happy about that. But enough people liked it, and we enjoyed every other aspect of the trip, that we all stayed happily.

Our weekend interlude was wonderful. Joey had arranged a bus ride visit over to the Abuyudaya Jews of Uganda, an obscure, small group. I don’t even know the history enough to get into it now. We went to their town and went to a Shabbat morning service, which was mostly in Hebrew, and spent lunch there and had a great time. This was mostly Joey [Joey’s doing].

All in all, the trip was great. Joey’s luggage was approximately a week late, so he was borrowing lots of clothes but complained not a bit. We were being led by other people, by Pesach and this other woman, and Joey was just one of the team. We made close friends. Nathan Cogan. Nancy Weintraub was on her first international trip, nervous but happy. Steve Goldberg and Linda Boise. I’m kind of blanking on the other people who were there. A great group. Bob Brown. Five of us arranged a safari in Tanzania before the work, and that was fantastic. A few of the others had arranged other safari-type trips before. They were happy. It was a great trip.

So a number of wonderful people like Carol Chestler, Nancy Chestler, and Shirley Rackner, and others . . .

Chestler: Sue Danielson.
MOSKOVITZ: Thank you. Had been making meals for the Goose Hollow Shelter for a long time, but in typical fashion didn’t tell anybody about it, let alone brag about it. And my wife and other people were looking for a way for Havurah to get connected, through the Tikkun Olam Committee, to look for a local thing. Always Gloria’s goal was to engage older children in doing tikkun olam things, good service. We learned about Goose Hollow overnight shelter for homeless families. Eight families could stay there for roughly up to a month with help finding jobs, and a wonderful, warm feeling. This is in a basement gymnasium of a huge church, United Methodist downtown [First United Methodist Church].

So Gloria and a lot of other people — certainly Gloria put a lot of energy into it — arranged to have a growing group of perhaps 40 Havurah people, of which about 20 have spent time there. Some families cook meals now. Once a month is our commitment. A few of us have done overnight there, which sounds difficult but is not. The families are great. The kids are great. In the evening after dinner, there are a couple of hours of homework and just playtime. The families are all wonderful. Struggling families. Havurah seems to be happily connected for some time now, I hope, with this wonderful organization doing really good work.

Chestler: That’s great. Is there anything else that we haven’t covered that you’d like to talk about?
MOSKOVITZ: No. This has been more enjoyable than I thought, thanks to you, so thank you for that.

Chestler: Thank you.