Dmitriy Salita left Ukraine, battled anti-Semitism and is the man backing Jermaine Franklin to beat Anthony Joshua

When aged 13, Dmitriy Salita first entered Brooklyn’s Starrett City Boxing Club. He was confronted by numerous black and Hispanic fighters, and was aware, as a white Jewish boy with an eastern European accent, of the extent to which he stood out.

He was eight the first time another child called him a 'zhid' – a derogatory term for Jew – and he responded by kicking him, and he was nine when in 1991 his parents chose to move with he and his brother from Odessa, as Ukraine declared its independence from the collapsing Soviet Union, in their determination to leave widespread anti-Semitism behind.

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In Odessa, the city of his birth, Salita – given his mother’s surname instead of his father’s of Lekhtman, through it sounding less Jewish – had learned karate. In Brooklyn he initially went to kickboxing, but his older brother Misha, who by then was going by the name Michael, encouraged him to box and ultimately changed the course of his life.

“I turned professional with Top Rank,” Salita, increasingly an influential promoter, told talkSPORT. “I was very involved with my career from the very beginning – asked [Top Rank] a lot of questions. Peaked behind the door to see what was going on. Liked some of the things that were going on with me; didn’t like other things.

“Paid attention to the fact Top Rank’s matchmaking was exceptional, building the fighters. Publicity was exceptional; very structured; very functional.

“From the very beginning of my career I fought on Wladimir Klitschko’s undercard; on Floyd Mayweather’s undercard; Erik Morales; Oscar De La Hoya; Miguel Cotto; Juan Manuel Marquez. Just, really exposed to the highest level of boxing.”

Before their move from Ukraine a cancerous lump had been discovered in Salita’s mother Lyudmila’s breast. It was treated by doctors in the US, but returned years later, and spread.

During one of her periods of treatment the husband of another woman on the same ward gave the teenaged Salita the number for the local Chabad centre. Salita and his brother started attending regularly to pray for her recovery, and Salita, who became increasingly observant and who believes her cancer was caused by the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, remained committed after her death.

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His first trainer, Jimmy O’Pharrow, had detected Salita’s potential as an amateur fighter and also, at a traumatic time in his life, of the stability he needed the sport to provide. It had already given Salita an identity after the uncertainty he had known in Ukraine and upon his arrival in New York, and eventually it became his anchor when, as one of the family of five – including his grandmother – living in a one-bedroom apartment in Flat Bush he slowly had to watch his mother die.

“I was born in 1982, still during communism,” he recalled. “I remember being called a name in kindergarten, and I didn’t know what it meant. They pushed me and called me names. I came home and asked my father and my mother, and they said, ‘It’s because you’re Jewish’. I didn’t understand how it made me different; made people not like me.

“The Soviet Union was shifting. It was a very uncertain period. In the city everybody knew where there would be bomb shelters. In school you’d be taught about what you do during a nuclear strike, and how to put on a gas mask.

“Most kids at the Starrett City Boxing Club [in Brooklyn] had the same financial troubles I did. It was subsidised by the city so you wouldn’t have to pay.

“My mother first got sick when we first came here. That first time around wasn’t terrible, but [when I was 14] it metastasised. She passed away when I was 16. Jimmy O gave me a safe haven, and a constructive place to let out my frustration.”

The early promise that, combined with the marketing novelty of him being Jewish, attracted Top Rank ultimately went unfulfilled. Salita progressed to challenging Amir Khan for the WBA super lightweight title in 2009 but then got stopped inside the opening round.

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His time at the Kronk under Emanuel and SugarHill Steward as he attempted to ignite his career didn’t deliver the success at world level he had dreamed of, but Emanuel Steward detected in him a successful future in the business of boxing, and to the extent that he told those around him – Andy Lee among them – of what he ultimately foresaw.

“Seeing Emanuel Steward work and operate outside of the limelight, at the Kronk Gym, which was in a very humble neighbourhood [in Detroit], train, work and communicate with people and see how his relationships are with the boxers – with different people up and down on the socioeconomic scale that came to the gym – is priceless,” Salita said.

“His influence was tremendous – [like] with chess, there’s the one grandmaster who walks around and plays a game with 30 different people at the same time. His attention to nuances and to details greatly improved me and gave me a different way to look at fights, and to look at boxing.”

Emanuel Steward died before the last of Salita’s fights – his second defeat, by Gabriel Bracero and via a decision – in November 2013.

By then “Star of David” – as he was still known at the end of a career in which his dedication to his faith and commitment to observing Sabbath took precedent over opportunities to fight – had already established Salita Promotions, which has since worked with, among others, Jermaine Franklin, Jarrell Miller, Otto Wallin, and the great Claressa Shields.