BIOS
Rabbi Mark Blazer is the President of the Jewish Life Foundation (JLF). The Foundation’s mission is to promote Jewish culture; the majority of its educational programming airs on Jewish Life Television (JLTV). JLTV is the only national international TV network dedicated to uplifting and Jewish values programming.
He has served as the spiritual leader of Temple Beth Ami in Santa Clarita, California since 2000. A community leader for more than 25 years, he was the first clergy member on the scene after the North Valley Jewish Community shooting in August of 1999. An attack that the perpetrator called "a wakeup call to America to kill Jews.”
Mark is the founder of the Albert Einstein Academy (AEA), the first K-12 Hebrew Charter School in the western United States. Within three years of opening AEA was in the top 1% of high schools in California. It now has schools in California, Ohio and coming soon to Arizona.
Rabbi Blazer also serves as chaplain for the LA County Sheriff’s Department and has served as chaplain for the California Department of Corrections. For eight years he ministered as the only prison rabbi serving statewide across California.
Rabbi Blazer studied at Oxford University and is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego. He received his semichah (rabbinical ordination) from the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York. Mark and his wife, Tracy are the proud parents of Rachel, Dina and Shira.
He continues the legacy of his father Phil, the founder of JLTV.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF OUR FOUNDER
1944-2020
Phil grew-up in Burbank where his love of his Jewish faith and culture, especially Jewish humor; baseball and radio - took early root. His high school dream was to own his own television network, that dream found its greatest expression in Jewish Life TV.
Phil continued as a radio host for five decades while building a media empire that included a nationally syndicated television show, NAME, and a national newspaper, Israel Today. In 2006, when many of his peers were ready for retirement, Phil threw himself into starting a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week Jewish television network. JLTV was a boyhood dream come true.
Phil's passion for promoting all facets of Jewish life and culture, as well as his love of Israel, developed into an activism that sprang from his loyal radio audience. In 1973, incensed at an oil company's anti-Israel stance, Phil urged his listeners to cut up the company's credit cards. His listeners responded by the thousands, filling trash bag after trash bag, which Phil then deposited at the company's headquarters. The dramatic stunt made the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite. He never looked back.
An inveterate risk taker, he helped smuggle a Torah into Leningrad under the noses of the KGB and organized the Skokie Skytrain to bring counter-protesters to confront neo-Nazis threatening the safety of Holocaust survivors in suburban Chicago. His proudest accomplishment was persuading the U.S. government to fly a secret mission to save 1,000 stranded and starving Ethiopian Jews from refugees camps in Sudan. Not all of Phil's activism involved such derring-do. He also established The Peace Force, volunteers who patrolled Los Angeles neighborhoods to protect Jewish seniors from anti-Semitic attacks. Phil was also instrumental in several states mandating Holocaust education in schools.
With a flair for show business and an innate understanding of what made a good story, he interviewed the people he found most interesting. He organized celebrity visits to Israel, acting as something between a media fixer and informal tour guide to such luminaries as Ben Kingsley, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Strauss, Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.
First Yahrtzeit Tribute
Watch the special tribute
to Phil Blazer
If you will it, it is no dream; and if you do not will it,
a dream it is and a dream it will stay
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-Theodor Herzl -