Martin Siegel

Martin Siegel attended and was ordained at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. In the 1960s he began his career at Temple Sinai in suburban Lawrence, N.Y. He recorded these experiences in his book, Amen: The Diary of Rabbi Martin Seigel (1971). Following the publication of his book, he was fired from his position in Lawrence, and moved to Columbia, Maryland, where he led the unaffiliated, progressive, and much smaller Columbia Jewish Congregation. He stayed there for nearly 30 years. For some of those years he was also president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. He retired from the Columbia congregation in 1998 and became a spiritual counsellor at an inner-city Baltimore shelter for homeless ex-felons, drug addicts and the emotionally troubled, where he incorporated basic kabalistic principles into the self-help materials he wrote and distributed to clients. He has written five books and taught and lectured at many colleges and universities.