Imi Lichtenfeld

Imre "Imi" Lichtenfeld (; ; 26 May 1910 – 9 January 1998), also known as Imi Sde-Or , was a Hungarian-born Israeli martial artist. He is widely recognized for developing Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art.

Early life Lichtenfeld was born on 26 May 1910 to a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family moved to Pozsony (present-day Bratislava), where his father, Samuel Lichtenfeld, was a chief inspector on the local police force and a former circus acrobat; he grew up there. Lichtenfeld trained at the Hercules Gymnasium, which was owned by his father, who taught self-defense.

Lichtenfeld was a successful swimmer, boxer, wrestler, and gymnast since his youth. 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.

In 1935, Lichtenfeld visited Mandatory Palestine with a team of Jewish wrestlers to participate in the Maccabiah 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 antisemitic violence. Lichtenfeld organized a group of young Jews to protect his community. On the streets, he acquired hard-won experience and a crucial understanding of the differences between sport fighting and street fighting. He developed his fundamental self-defense principle: 'use natural movements and reactions' for defense, combined with an immediate and decisive counterattack. From this evolved the refined theory of 'simultaneous defense and attack,' while 'never occupying two hands in the same defensive movement.'

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 Czechoslovak 11th Infantry Battalion in North Africa. In 1944, Lichtenfeld began training Haganah fighters in his areas of expertise: physical fitness, swimming, wrestling, use of the knife, and defenses against knife attacks. During this period, he trained several elite units of the Haganah and Palmach (striking force of the Haganah and forerunner of the special units of the IDF), 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-defense and hand-to-hand combat. Lichtenfeld retired from the Israeli military in 1964. The method was formulated to suit everyone—man and woman, boy or girl—who might need it to survive an attack while sustaining minimal harm. To disseminate his method, Lichtenfeld established two training centers, one in Tel Aviv and the other in Netanya. He trained teams of Krav Maga instructors, who were accredited by him and the Israeli Ministry of Education. He is buried at Netanya Shikun Vatikim Cemetery on Section פ.