@Gail Badner, unfortunately I do not believe either of those are the same issue:

HHH-12210 Awaiting Test Case - we have not enabled hibernate.enable_lazy_load_no_trans - that sounds like a bad idea to me!
HHH-12260 Open - could be promising but that specific issue doesn't seem to be with a LazyInitializationException?

As far as retrieving the Hibernate lock mode, I am using the Session getCurrentLockMode() API; however, it does have the same issue as the EntityManager with respect to the refresh resetting this value.

// Looking at the hibernate Session class, I believe this essentially calls exactly the same thing you are describing above via the PersistenceContext API.
LockMode lockMode = em.unwrap(Session.class).getCurrentLockMode();