Imi Lichtenfeld

was born on May 26, 1910, in Budapest, back when the Austro-Hungarian Empire still held its sway over Central Europe. His family wasn’t just any family—his father, Samuel Lichtenfeld, was a chief inspector with the local police force, and before that, he had a career as a circus acrobat. With a father like that, it wasn’t long before Imi found his way into the world of physical training.

He grew up in Pressburg, today’s Bratislava, where he trained at the Hercules Gymnasium—the same gym his father ran. Imi didn’t just dabble in one sport; he excelled at several. A swimmer, a boxer, a wrestler, and a gymnast. By the time he was a young man, he was already winning national championships, and his skills in wrestling earned him a spot on the Slovak National Wrestling Team.

But in the late 1930s, as anti-Semitic violence began to rise in his hometown, Imi's life took a turn. The violence in the streets was no longer something you could solve with sport; it was about survival. So, alongside a group of other Jewish athletes, he began defending his neighborhood from fascist gangs. It was in those brutal street battles that Lichtenfeld realized there was a vast difference between what he’d learned in the gym and what you needed to defend yourself in the real world. That’s when he started developing a new system, one designed for the streets, a system he would later call Krav Maga.

In 1935, Imi visited Palestine with a team of wrestlers for the Maccabiah Games, but a rib injury prevented him from competing. That injury stuck with him, reminding him of a crucial principle that would later become part of his system: don’t get hurt while training. As the political climate worsened in Europe, Imi returned to Czechoslovakia, where the violence against the Jewish population grew worse. He organized a group of young men to protect his community, and it was there, through real-world experience, that he honed his approach to defense—a method that combined natural movements with quick, decisive counterattacks.

In 1940, as the shadow of Nazi Germany loomed large, Lichtenfeld fled to Palestine. The journey wasn’t easy. The ship he was on, the Pencho, was shipwrecked on the Dodecanese Islands before he finally made it to Palestine in 1942. While in Palestine, he served in the British-supervised Czechoslovak 11th Infantry Battalion during the war in North Africa. By 1944, with the rise of the Israeli Defense Forces, Lichtenfeld began training members of the Haganah and later the Palmach, which was the special forces arm of the Haganah. He trained these elite fighters in physical fitness, wrestling, and hand-to-hand combat, while also teaching them how to defend themselves against knife attacks.

In 1948, when the State of Israel was officially born, Lichtenfeld became the Chief Instructor for Physical Fitness and Krav Maga at the IDF School of Combat Fitness, where he would serve for the next 20 years, perfecting the system and teaching it to Israeli soldiers. But when he retired from the military in 1964, his work didn’t stop. He turned his attention to the everyday person—the civilians, the men and women who might need this knowledge to survive an attack on the streets. He established two Krav Maga training centers in Tel Aviv and Netanya, and began to train instructors, certifying them through the Israeli Ministry of Education.

Lichtenfeld’s influence grew far and wide. In 1978, he founded the Israeli Krav Maga Association, and in 1995, he established the International Krav Maga Federation, helping spread his teachings across the globe. When he passed away on January 9, 1998, in Netanya, Israel, he was 87 years old. But even now, his legacy endures. His method of self-defense, Krav Maga, is taught in countless countries, by countless instructors, and has saved more lives than we’ll ever know.

Imi Lichtenfeld wasn’t just a fighter—he was a man who saw the need for survival in a world that seemed to forget the value of it. His system was simple: defend quickly, and strike decisively. And that, my friend, is why his name will never be forgotten.