Sylvan Siegler

Of Blessed Memory 1925 – 2010

Sylwe Siegler was born in 1925 in Kaisersesch, Germany. He was twelve years old when he and his family fled to the United States in 1937. In Kaisersech, his father Bernard was a cattle dealer, his mother Amalie ran a small notions business in the house, and Sylvan attended public school. Barred from school by the Nazis in 1936, he would travel to Koblenz to attend Zionist meetings. In the United States, the Sieglers lived in Pittsburgh, on a farm outside of Maysville, Missouri, and in Omaha, where Sylvan won first place in a newspaper essay contest by describing what he was thankful for. After his military service – he was in Germany during World War II and in Japan during the Korean War, which broke out on the same day that he passed his bar exam – he obtained a position with the Internal Revenue Service in Kansas City, where he met his wife Merna.