From KAPAP to Krav Maga: The untold story of the first Israeli martial art

When you think of Israeli martial arts, you automatically think of Krav Maga; KAPAP probably doesn’t ring a bell. Yet step into a nursing home in Israel and ask anyone over 90 years of age, and it will most likely trigger fond memories from their youth. 

A quick Google search of the famed Krav Maga style will reveal that it is derived from KAPAP. But search for that term, and you'll find yourself with limited answers.

Historian Noah Gross tried to fill in the blanks, explaining the historic style to i24NEWS.

A Hebrew acronym for Krav Panim al Panim (literally, face-to-face combat), KAPAP was developed in the 1940s by the Haganah, the largest paramilitary force in pre-state Israel. It was based on a stick-fighting method that was promulgated by one particular Ukrainian immigrant to the British Mandate of Palestine, Maishel Hurwitz. 

When Gross embarked on his research in the 1990s, he met Hurwitz and was surprised to learn that one of the fathers of KAPAP had never even heard of Krav Maga, nor did he know its founder, Imi Lechtenfeld, despite his also having been a KAPAP instructor. Hurwitz also had no idea that the style he developed was used by the IDF into the 1950s. 

The roots of the style 

“There are many ways of categorizing martial arts styles,” Gross told us. “Some developed as a way to preserve old traditions — in this case, the Asian martial arts are the first to come to mind. Other styles were created to work for a specific era, such as those that militaries use. KAPAP belongs to the latter category.”

From 70 CE, when the Second Temple was destroyed, until 1948, when the new state was established, no Jewish martial art style existed per se. But, the members of the Jewish Underground needed a way to combat Arab and British hostilities in the Mandate. 

Beginning in the late 1920s, the Haganah would channel its members into Hapoel, the labor union’s sports association, where they could disguise much of their combat training as “sport.”

Gross described the initial figures as developers rather than founders. Alongside Hurwitz were other leaders bringing their disciplines to the training: Gershon Kopler (jiu jitsu and boxing), Yehuda Markus (jiu jitsu and judo) and Yitzhak Shtibel (boxing). This melding of martial arts from Europe and Japan resulted in the new Jewish fighting style. 

In 1940, Hurwitz witnessed a protest in Haifa. What he saw there would revolutionize martial arts itself: 10 British police officers managed to successfully disperse hundreds of Jewish protesters. The well-trained policemen struck at a few protesters with their clubs, and the much larger crowd scattered at the first sight of blood. 

This event led to the advent of the stick-fighting system. 

For an untrained person, if someone comes at you with a weapon, the natural response is to duck and cover your head. Attempting to block the baton with your hands is a bad idea, however, you can protect yourself with another object. Enter: the stick. Relatively easy to conceal, Hurwitz trained his acolytes on how to wield the simple wooden implement more effectively.

The first set of moves they learned was to use a stick to block an assailant’s weapon, pushing the stick forward to create momentum to reduce harm done by the impact, rather than scuttle backwards. This was followed by a swift kick to the stomach to disarm the assailant.

Hurwitz’s work originated in his own improvised learning rather than a lineage handed down over generations. Haganah members would repeat the drills over and over. After trainees had ample practice, there was a summary drill, or a “gauntlet”, to test what they had learned.

Neriel Hurwitz, Maishel’s son, recounted to i24NEWS, “Whenever we visited Tel Aviv, former trainees would inevitably recognize him, and my father claimed that he ‘did not remember them.’” Smiling, the younger Hurwitz confided, “But, you most likely wouldn’t forget the face of someone who struck you on the head! That could be traumatic. So maybe he just didn’t want to remember!” 

The local Arabs would also use a wooden club, called the nabut, and some Jews in earlier Aliyah (Jewish immigration) waves had already adopted the same type of implement for guarding livestock or for self-defense. But the standard stick used by the Haganah had a slimmer design. 

KAPAP goes mainstream

Hurwitz gained the attention of Haganah member Rafael (Rafa) Atlas after Hurwitz was involved in a skirmish with local Arabs in the village of Ashrafiya in 1940, and ended up in the Acre jail for 11 days.  

Gross recounted the exchange between Atlas and Hurwitz: “Rafa was trained by the Jewish brigade, and here he was facing this 20-year-old who claimed to have added stuff ‘here and there.’ Rafa probably thought to himself, ‘This doesn’t make sense.’ So, he gave Maishel a book from the library written by H.R. Lang, a British police officer, about the French Vigny stick-fighting method, which was further developed in India. Rafa told him to study it.” The first thing Maishel did was to have it translated from English to Hebrew. 

By December of 1941, the style was being studied even by the Palmach (Haganah’s elite unit). Over time, KAPAP became synonymous with stick fighting, even though its students were learning other disciplines too, such as boxing, jiu jitsu and grappling. 

Other eclectic methods of combat that the Jewish militants learned ranged from stones to axes. Before his death at age 107, Yossi Zieloni told us about learning stone throwing using oranges, saying “We had to use whatever we could find to defend ourselves, and stones are easy to find.” Eventually, this tactic lost popularity, and the only people alive who remember stone-throwing today are over 100 years of age. In another rare instance, at Kibbutz Ein HaShofat, one Motke Eish HaGarzen aka "Motke the axman" would teach trainees how to use an ax. 

“I found it strange that we had to learn stick fighting, when all the combat was ultimately with a gun,” Steve Janco told us. The long-stick fell out of favor because it required more time to master and was harder to conceal. Nevertheless, lessons continued among IDF women’s units until as late as the 1960s.“Experimentation was part of the process,” Gross explained.

The Haganah also used KAPAP against the rival Jewish militia, the Irgun, in a series of conflicts called “saizon” (literally: hunting season). After the skirmishes, Haganah members would hand over captured Irgun militants to British authorities. According to former Irgun member Meir Kaminski, Irgun members also learned KAPAP from Haganah defectors. 

In contrast, the Lehi group — another underground Jewish militia — did not adopt the style. Ezra Yakhin, a former Lehi member, told us, “Being the smallest militia, we went for efficiency and didn’t want to waste time with sticks.” He felt that the Haganah could afford to learn stick-fighting because they were more mainstream and collaborated with the British to a certain extent. 

Gross explained there was a “flow of information” among the militias, and this included knowledge of KAPAP. Irgun members infiltrated Haganah units, and militia members sometimes switched sides. Many families even had siblings who were active in rival groups. 

Hurwitz eventually stopped teaching in 1945, and moved to Kibbutz Hefzi-bah. However, he returned to KAPAP again briefly when he went to Europe after the Second World War and taught refugees at internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. 

By 1948, KAPAP was being widely taught across Israel and in IDP camps in Cyprus, where Jews attempting to reach the land of Israel were being held by British authorities. One former Cyprus detainee and Holocaust survivor from Austria, Anne Kelemen, recounted to i24NEWS: “Unless you were pregnant, you most likely got a KAPAP lesson.” Gross estimates that out of 500,000 people in the nascent nation, approximately one-tenth had received at least one basic lesson. 

The legacy of KAPAP

Upon the declaration of Israel’s statehood, members of the paramilitary became integrated into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). A few Kibbutzim ran stick-fighting  lessons, and a few former Haganah members taught it to their children and grandchildren. But as an organized martial art, KAPAP didn’t gain the commercial success that its successor Krav Maga would achieve. 

Gross explained, “KAPAP of the 1940s is clearly distinguishable from modern-day Krav Maga, yet they are closely connected. There would be no Krav Maga if not for the structure on which its predecessor was built upon.”

“Anything and everything created by a human culture, whether it is artistic or purely functional, is bound to either perish or evolve one day. And this principle also applied to KAPAP.”