The Comprehensive Survival Arts martial arts training company may have closed its doors in 2021, but its impact is still strongly felt in Baltimore’s Jewish community. On Monday, July 29, the family-run company gained a permanent seat at the Rosenbloom Owings Mills JCC when its CSA Studio gym was dedicated in its honor.
While it may bear a new acronym now — standing for the more general “cardio, strength and agility” — the newly dedicated gym stands as a testament to 30 years of JCC partnership, with thousands of kids and teens being taught self-defense, mindfulness and discipline.
CSA was founded by Doug Lake, who first developed a love of martial arts when a friend invited him to take part in a Bando (a Burmese martial art) class. He soon branched out to studying aikido, jiu-jitsu and kung fu, and found that each of these different disciplines had certain aspects that he enjoyed. He started combining these disparate elements, which was how CSA as a system was born.
“He came up with Comprehensive Survival Arts as an eclectic system that took the best from everything and brought it together. It was born out of his experience in martial arts at a very young age,” explained Jennifer Lake, Doug Lake’s daughter, who joined her father as a teacher a few years in. “He wanted to come up with a system that could fit everyone. If people came in and didn’t want to do all the ground work, for example, they could focus on kicking or on their upper body. The whole basis was accommodation.”
Jennifer Lake recalled that her father had taught martial arts out of their house for nearly as long as she could remember — she would sometimes wake up and feel the house shaking because people were punching and kicking the sandbags that hung from their basement ceiling. She and her father bonded over their shared love of both martial arts and visual art, and at 14, she started assisting him with classes.
CSA’s collaboration with the JCC of Greater Baltimore started in 1991, when Lake was a karate instructor at the former Camp Milldale. A martial arts instructor who was working at the JCC at the time reached out to Lake about wanting to grow his own class, which only had about 15 students.
During the 30 years that Doug and Jennifer Lake taught martial arts at the JCC, they more than doubled the size of that initial class, and then started opening even more classes at the Owings Mills JCC and the Park Heights JCC.
“Comprehensive Survival Arts was always a perfect fit with values of the Jewish Community Center. Being family oriented as father and daughter teaching martial arts and wellness, we thrived off parents who wanted strong human values instilled in their children,” Doug Lake said. “The martial arts was a great conduit to convey those values. Often, we would have every child in a family, as well as the parents and sometimes the grandparents in our classes.”
CSA even offered a summer karate camp, which ran for 13 weeks during its peak year. But the campers would do more than just martial arts: The Lakes would implement a community service project every week, ranging from martial arts demonstrations at the Weinberg Village apartments to making and bagging lunches for local homeless shelters.
Ironically, one of the few martial arts not integrated into CSA’s practices was Israeli krav maga, primarily due to safety concerns.
While the Lakes are not Jewish — Jennifer Lake’s grandfather is Jewish, but neither she nor her father are — Jennifer Lake’s said that she felt that their partnership with the JCC was very meaningful.
“As a non-Jewish family coming into the Jewish community, we were immediately embraced, and we embraced and respected the [Jewish] traditions and values, integrating Judaism into our program,” Jennifer Lake said. “We held camp Shabbat from the moment we started karate camp, we practiced tikkun olam, taught the importance of kavod and many other shared values.”
When CSA closed in 2021, it was due to the COVID-19 pandemic making operations unsustainable. Doug and Jennifer Lake moved on — Doug Lake to travel and photography, and Jennifer Lake to Radcliffe Jewelers in Pikesville as a client experience manager. But CSA still left a lasting impact on many in the JCC of Greater Baltimore, so when Chief Advancement Officer Esther Greenberg reached out to the Lakes to ask if they would be interested in having a studio dedicated to them, they gladly accepted.
“We felt the blessing of the goodness of the JCC extended to us that our studio and ourselves will always be recognized as a training center that grew love, personal growth both physical and emotional and forever friendships,” Doug Lake said. “Those years were our best years, and we are very proud and blessed to have shared those years as one family.”
The dedication and plaque unveiling was attended by many former CSA students.
“For 30 years, I was known in the community as Ms. Jen,” Jennifer Lake added. “To this day, when I see past students, they still call me Ms. Jen, and it warms my heart.”
