There is a Greek word the early teachers used when they wanted to describe something much more exact than “memory.” The word is anamnesis (am-a-nee-sis). It does not mean recalling a fact, the way you recall a phone number or a date. It means bringing something real out of the past and into the present so completely that it lives again — so that the original is not described but re-presented, made present, acting fully in the now.
It is the difference between reading about a fire and feeling its heat.
I want to use that word carefully here, because it is the most precise thing I know to say about what Krav Maga Worldwide actually is, and why it is definitely not the same thing as a name on a certificate.
Lineage is not a genealogy
Most of what passes for “lineage” in the martial arts is genealogy — a list of names arranged like an ancestry chart, each one vouching for the last. Genealogy is a claim about the past. It says: this came from that.
Anamnesis is a claim about the present. It says that what was is still here.
Those are not the same, and the gap between them is where most systems quietly lose the thing they claim to honor. A signature can be inherited. A diploma can be framed. But the living intent of a founder — the why underneath every movement, the judgment that understands when a technique is being properly transmitted and when it is being hollowed out — cannot be inherited passively. It has to be carried, deliberately, by people who were close enough to the authentic source to know exactly what they are protecting.
That is the whole argument. Everything else is a matter of irrelevant details.
From Imi’s own hand
The source is Imi Lichtenfeld, who built Krav Maga on the streets of Bratislava and refined it on the battlefields and training grounds of the Israel Defense Forces. Imi did not leave behind a brand. He left behind a system and a small number of people he trusted to keep it whole and alive.
Darren Levine was one of them. In 1981, Darren was among the very first group chosen to train in Krav Maga outside of Israel. What followed was not a transaction but a friendship — Imi came to Los Angeles to stay with Darren and keep training him personally. And when Imi acknowledged that bond, he did it in a way that has no equivalent on a wall of certificates: he gave Darren one of only two Founder’s Diplomas he ever awarded, and he placed his own black belt around Darren’s waist.
Think about what that gesture means in the grammar of anamnesis. A diploma points back to a single moment. A teacher’s own belt does something else — it puts the source directly in the room. It is Imi saying, in the only language a martial artist fully trusts: what I am, you now carry.
Darren carried it for the rest of his life. He passed in January of this year, and the grief of that loss is still close. May his memory be a blessing. But grief is precisely the moment that tests whether a system has anamnesis or only genealogy. When the teacher is gone, a genealogy becomes a museum. Anamnesis becomes a profound responsibility.
Stewardship is not nostalgia
This is where the word earns its place in the KMW ecosystem. With Imi gone since 1998, and now Darren gone too, the question is no longer who studied under whom. The question is: is the source still present, and who keeps it present?
At Krav Maga Worldwide that work is held — deliberately and structurally — by two people who learned it directly from Darren, and who together represent the two things a system actually needs to stay effective and alive.
CJ Kirk carries the depth. As Steward and the organization’s first Master Instructor, his charge is the architecture — the layered, principle-driven logic that makes Krav Maga a coherent system rather than a catalogue full of techniques. This is the part outsiders never see and the part that decays first when no one is guarding it: the sequencing, the internal coherence, the reasons the system is built the way it is. Protecting that is not nostalgia. It is the refusal to let the system drift into a collection of impressive-looking parts that no longer add up to Imi’s genius.
Jon Pascal carries the transmission. Forty years in the system, eight degrees of black belt, decades inside Force Training — Jon holds the discipline of how the system is meant to be taught and pressure-tested so that it survives contact with reality and fully supports the next instructor, and the one after that. Depth without transmission dies in one generation. Transmission without depth spreads something dangerously hollow. You need both, and they must be collaborative and closely held.
Between them, you have the two channels the founder’s intent actually travels through: the what and the how, the body of knowledge and the way it is handed on. Both run directly back through Darren to Imi. Not by reputation. By direct, interpersonal contact.
The dojo as the place where the source is present
Over the years, many organizations have claimed proximity to Imi while the actual connection quietly went slack — the name retained, the substance disconnected. That is the ordinary fate of genealogy. It is not an accusation; it is reality. Systems lose their source the way rooms lose heat, slowly and without anyone deciding to let it happen.
What sets Krav Maga Worldwide apart is not that it remembers Imi better. It is that the conditions for anamnesis are still fully intact: a documentable, hand-to-hand transmission from the founder’s own belt, held now by a steward of the system’s depth and a steward of its teaching, both formed directly by the man Imi entrusted.
So when a student walks into a Krav Maga Worldwide class, the claim being made is larger than heritage. It is that the source is in the room. Every class is, in the oldest and most exact sense of the word, an act of anamnesis — the moment the original is not recalled but relived, and the living intent of the founder reshapes what happens on the mat.
That is the inheritance. And an inheritance, unlike a memory, is something we are obligated to keep alive.
