Yehoshua Sofer
- Yehoshua Sofer is also the name of a victim of the June 2010 West Bank shooting.
Yehoshua Sofer (Hebrew: יהושע סופר) is an Israeli hip hop musician and martial artist.
Biography
He was born in 1958 as Nigel Wilson into a Breslover Hasidim family in Jamaica. His family moved to Los Angeles in 1963 where he studied Tang Soo Do, receiving a black belt by 1968, aged ten. He studied Kuk Sool Won from 1974, advancing to 6th dan, and worked as a trainer and bodyguard during the 1970s and 1980s.
He moved to Israel in 1989, and in 1993, he recorded a minor Israeli hip hop hit in Hebrew, חומוס מטמטם Humus Metamtem ("Humus Makes You Stupid"). In 2000, he ran a Kuk Sool Won school at the International Convention, Jerusalem.
In 2002, he founded the Abir Warrior Arts Association of Israel, teaching his own style of "Abir-Qesheth Hebrew Warrior Arts" (אבי״ר-קשת אומנות לחימה עברית) in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, claiming an unbroken tradition dating to Israelite antiquity[1] preserved by an underground school of "Bani Abir" in Habban, Yemen, and styling himself Aluf Abir אלוף אבי״ר "Grandmaster of Abir". The word אביר abir in Modern Hebrew means "knight", interpreted as an acronym אבי״ר, for אדוננו, בוראנו, יוצרנו, רופאנו ("Our Lord, our Creator, our Maker, our Healer").
The school's logo spells the word in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet as 𐤀𐤁𐤉𐤓; the letter shapes are significant because of Abir's "Aleph-Beth Fighting System" where "Abir practitioners learn to assume the forms of the twenty-two Hebrew letters in all of their seven types of combat applications." The addition qeshet קשת means "bow, arch" and refers to a method of "always striking with an arched limb in a looping, elliptical, or circular manner".[citation needed] Although Sofer advocates his style as a "kosher" martial art, people from all walks of life and religious commitment are welcome to train. The style does incorporate prayer and the reading of texts because "Abir is a religious practice which includes Torah studies," but it does not mandate what a practitioner's personal choices are outside of the dojo.
See also
- Krav Maga, a 20th century origin Israeli martial art conceived by Imi Sde-Or in the 1940s
References
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- The Flying Breslav Chasid, The Jerusalem Report, 24 April 2000.
- Asking: Yehoshua Sofer, Martial Arts Illustrated Magazine, May 2010.
External links
- Hebrew Warrior Arts official website
- Introduction to Abir Martial Arts with Grandmaster Yehoshua Sofer on MuseumSecrets TV
- ABIR - Biblical Martial Arts on YouTube
- Sofer in Israel Unseen
- The Return of Abir
- Pages with broken file links
- Articles containing Hebrew-language text
- Articles containing non-English-language text
- Articles with unsourced statements from January 2014
- 1958 births
- Living people
- Israeli martial artists
- Israeli hip hop musicians
- Jamaican emigrants to Israel
- Jamaican Jews
- Israeli Jews
- Jewish martial artists
