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THE HISTORY
OF
KRAV MAGA
The concept of Krav Maga was created by Imi Lichtenfeld in the first half of the 20th century just before World War II. It was an answer to hate-driven violence spreading in Europe as Nazi gangs started to appear and harassing minorities.
Imi was born on May the 26th, 1910, to a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He grew up in Pressburg (Pozsony, today's Bratislava). His family moved to Bratislava, where his father, Samuel Lichtenfeld, was a chief inspector on the Bratislava police force and a former circus acrobat. Lichtenfeld trained at the Hercules Gymnasium, which was owned by his father, who taught gymnastics, self-defense and law enforcement techniques.
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Lichtenfeld was a successful boxer, wrestler, and gymnast since his youth. He competed at national and international levels and was a champion and member of the Slovak National Wrestling Team. In 1928, he won the Slovak Youth Wrestling Championship, and in 1929, the adult championship in the light and middleweight divisions. That year, he also won the national boxing championship and an international gymnastics championship.
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In the late 1930s, anti-Semitic riots threatened the Jewish population of Bratislava. Together with other Jewish boxers and wrestlers, Lichtenfeld helped to defend his Jewish neighborhood against racist gangs. He quickly decided that sport was much different from real combat and began developing a system of techniques for practical self-defence in life-threatening situations.
In 1935, Lichtenfeld visited Palestine with a team of Jewish wrestlers to participate in the Maccabi games but could not participate because of a broken rib that resulted from his training while en route. This led to the fundamental Krav Maga precept, 'do not get hurt' while training. Lichtenfeld returned to Czechoslovakia to face increasing anti-Semitic violence. Lichtenfeld organized a group of young Jews to protect his community. On the streets, he acquired hard won experience and the crucial understanding of the differences between sport fighting and street fighting. He developed his fundamental self-defence principle: 'use natural movements and reactions' for defence, combined with an immediate and decisive counterattack. From this evolved the simplified theory of 'simultaneous defence and attack.
In 1940, Lichtenfeld fled the rise of Nazism in Slovakia, heading for Palestine on the Aliyah Bet vessel, Pencho, which shipwrecked on the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. He reached Palestine in 1942 after serving with distinction in the British supervised Free Czechoslovak Legion in North Africa. The leaders of Jewish paramilitary organisation in The British Mandate of Palestine- Haganah immediately recognized Lichtenfeld's fighting prowess and ingenuity.
In 1944 Lichtenfeld began training fighters in his areas of expertise: physical fitness, swimming, wrestling, use of the knife, and defences against knife attacks. During this period, Lichtenfeld trained several elite units of the Haganah and Palmach (striking force of the Haganah and forerunner of the special units of the IDF- Israel Defence Forces), including the Pal-yam, as well as groups of police officers. In 1948, when the State of Israel was founded and the IDF was formed, Lichtenfeld became Chief Instructor for Physical Fitness and Krav Maga at the IDF School of Combat Fitness. He served in the IDF for about 20 years, during which time he developed and refined his unique method for self-defence and hand-to-hand combat. After he finished his active duty, Lichtenfeld began adapting and modifying Krav Maga to civilian needs.
The method was formulated to suit everyone – man and woman, boy or girl, who might need it to save his or her life or survive an attack while sustaining minimal harm, whatever the background of the attack – criminal, nationalistic, racial or other. To disseminate his method, Lichtenfeld established two training centers, one in Tel Aviv and the other in Netanya.
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In 1964, Lichtenfeld retired from the Israeli military. He then modified Krav Maga to fit the needs of police forces and ordinary civilians. He trained teams of Krav Maga instructors, who were accredited by him and the Israeli Ministry of Education. On January the 9th, 1998, Lichtenfeld died in Netanya (Israel) at the age of 87. For the remainder of his life and until his final days, Imi continued to develop Krav Maga techniques, concepts, and instructional methods with the assistance of his closest students. Imi always took great care to promote his universal principles of respect for others, avoidance of undue or unjustified use of force, modesty, peace-loving conduct, and strict adherence to fair play.
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"... So the one may walk in peace..."
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