Le Krav Maga, un art martial israélien, fait le buzz à Paris

Paris - In a dark alley in a poor suburb of this city, five men with violence on their minds closed in fast on 17-year-old Netanel Azoulay and his older brother, Yaakov.

“Dirty Jews, you’re going to die!” one man yelled.

The driving dispute quickly transformed into something physical, with one of the assailants wielding a saw. Azoulay — who, along with his brother, wears a kippah — nearly lost his finger and had his shoulder dislocated before passers-by broke up the brawl.

The Feb. 21 incident in Bondy was one of dozens of anti-Semitic assaults — among hundreds of less violent episodes — recorded annually in the Paris region. This altercation, however, was particularly shocking because of its bloodiness, and how it illustrated how quickly harassment can lead to bloodshed

But Azoulay’s injuries could have been worse. Azoulay has a brown belt in Krav Contact, a variant of Krav Maga, the self-defense martial art developed in Israel. And, in fact, he has been training for such a moment for years.

“I think Krav saved our lives,” said Azoulay, who started training as a child, like his brother, in order to defend himself on Bondy’s rough streets.

Azoulay’s father is a Krav Contact instructor, and the family was an early adopter of the method when it was still largely unknown in France. Over the past decade, however, thousands of French Jews — and some non-Jews, too — have turned to Krav Maga amid a wave of intimidation and violence on the streets of France’s major cities.

“There’s an explosion in the popularity of Krav Maga,” said Avi Attlan, one of the technique’s pioneers in France.

Publié dans le Jpost le 1er Avril 2017, lire la suite ici