Imi Lichtenfeld

Origins and early life

Imi Lichtenfeld — Imrich Lichtenfeld, later Imi Sde-Or — was born on 26 May 1910 in Budapest to a Hungarian Jewish family and grew up in Bratislava, where his father Samuel, a police chief inspector and former circus acrobat, taught self-defence at the Hercules gymnasium.

Work and career

He was Slovak youth wrestling champion in 1928 and took adult titles in wrestling, boxing and gymnastics in 1929; when fascist and antisemitic gangs began attacking the Jewish quarter of Bratislava in the mid-1930s he led a group of Jewish boxers and wrestlers in its defence, and learned there that sport fighting teaches almost nothing about a street attack. Out of that gap he built Krav Maga: defence and counter-attack in one natural movement, and never two hands occupied by the same block.

He fled Slovakia in May 1940 aboard the Aliyah Bet steamer Pentcho, which broke up in the Aegean that October; he served with the British-supervised Czechoslovak 11th Infantry Battalion in North Africa, reached Mandatory Palestine in 1942 and trained Haganah, Palmach and Pal-Yam units in unarmed combat.

Later years

When the Israel Defense Forces were founded in 1948 he became their chief instructor for physical fitness and Krav Maga at the School of Combat Fitness, retiring in 1964; he then rewrote the method for police officers and for ordinary civilians, opened schools in Tel Aviv and Netanya, founded the Israeli Krav Maga Association in 1978, and died in Netanya on 9 January 1998.