- Yehoshua Sofer is also the name of a victim of the June 2010 West Bank shooting.
Yehoshua Sofer () an Israeli hip hop musician and martial artist. Yehoshua Sofer was born 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,
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-Abir-Qesheth Hebrew Warrior Arts" () in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, claiming an unbroken tradition dating to Israelite antiquity preserved by an underground school of "Bani Abir" in
Habban, Yemen, and styling himself
Aluf Abir "Grandmaster of Abir".The word
abir in
Modern Hebrew means "
knight", interpreted as an acronym ,for ("
Our Lord, our Creator, our Maker, our Healer").
The school's logo spells the word in the
Phoenician alphabet as ; 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...
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