CHESHIRE, Conn.

“The groin!” exclaimed Madison Schiavi.

Madison, an 8-year-old with a reddish-brown ponytail, had minced no words with her quick (and correct) response to the suggestion that she “talk about some vital spots we can hit.”

“Pop their eardrum!” suggested Erika Barolli, 10. “Or gouge the eye socket.”

Jamie Arute, 37, a brawny man clad in black exercise gear, nodded approvingly before the seven young charges in his studio here. Just to make sure they got it, Mr. Arute  an instructor in Krav Maga, the Israeli hand-to-hand combat technique whose premise is “blow your assailant away, then run”  added, “then kick them in the rib, pull out, another round kick, and you take it to town!”

He turned to an onlooker.

“We talk a lot about hitting in the face with a palm check,” he explained, “but there are some other good parts we can strike. We want to know where to hit to create some damage.”

Krav Maga is enjoying an unusual burst of popularity among American children who might otherwise be practicing karate chops. Born in the Jewish quarter of Nazi-infested Bratislava, then part of Czechoslovakia, in the 1930s and embraced by the Israel Defense Forces after the founding of Israel in 1948, Krav Maga (“contact combat” in Hebrew) spent decades in America as a cult activity inside a handful of gyms in Los Angeles and New York.