Henry L. Moses, from Scranton, Pennsylvania, went to Yale on scholarship, graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1900, and after completing Columbia Law School in 1903 went to work at Stroock & Stroock, where he became a partner. In the course of working for that firm he met Henry P. Goldschmidt, a banker and investor who had acquired Public National Bank and Trust Company of New York. Henry Moses married Mr. Goldschmidt’s daughter Lucy in 1914, when he was 27.

Moses left Stroock to form Moses Singer around 1919, with Henry B. Singer, his older cousin and brother-in-law from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, an 1895 graduate of New York University and an 1896 graduate of the NYU law school. Their original offices were at 55 Liberty Street and, later, 30 Pine Street. Within a few years, the Firm had three additional partners, Abraham H. Rubenstein, Sam L. Cohen, from Minneapolis and a graduate of New York Law School, and Herman G. Kopald, from Omaha and a graduate of the University of Chicago and Columbia Law School.

Henry Moses and his wife Lucy devoted the remainder of their lives to philanthropy, principally to what was then Montefiore Home for Chronic Invalids, on whose Board Mr. Moses served from 1923 until his death in 1961. As president and chairman of the board, Mr. Moses was responsible for Montefiore’s rise as a major medical center. They created various endowed chairs, scholarship funds and grants at Columbia Law School, Yale School of Music City College, NYU, Barnard College, and Lehigh University and at several of the City’s hospitals, in addition to major gifts to Montefiore.

They also established the Henry and Lucy Moses Fund which remains an important source of support in the cultural life of New York through substantial annual gifts from income generated by the Fund and from charitable trusts established during their lifetimes and under their wills. The Moses Fund is now administered by Irving Sitnick and Joe Fishman (a former partner of the firm), and there are about 75 different annual grants to New York charities and other institutions in education, conservation, culture and the arts, medicine and social services. Recipients of major annual grants include UJA/Federation of Jewish Philanthropies (of which Henry Moses was chairman for some years), Central Park Conservancy (of which Lucy Moses was one of the founders), Education Alliance, Lucy Moses School of Music & Dance, Prospect Park Alliance, New York Landmarks Conservancy (the Fund’s grant supports the annual Lucy G. Moses awards for historic preservation) and WNYC, as well as smaller arts organizations such as Jose Limon Dance Foundation and Barge Music (for which the Fund is the leading underwriter).