A family finds at Yad Vashem a miniature Hebrew Bible written in the Lodz ghetto

Three generations of Shlomo Knobel's family, a Holocaust survivor, recently visited Yad Vashem to discover a miniature Hebrew Bible that he had written in the Lodz ghetto during World War II.

About the size of a matchbox, the work consists of 85 pages written in micrography. According to Ynet, Shlomo Knobel created it over nearly three years while living in the ghetto with his wife, Shifra, and their 3-year-old son, Chaim Alter. At the time, he was working in a factory producing military shoes.

He used a special ink, bought at the cost of part of his family's bread rations, in order to prevent the text from fading. His young son proudly repeated, "My father is writing a Bible."

In 1943, Shlomo Knobel bound the book before presenting it to Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Judenrat of the ghetto. The first pages notably feature micrographic illustrations, including a portrait of Rumkowski composed of tiny biblical verses.

Shlomo Knobel's son was murdered during the Holocaust. Shlomo and his wife survived, had another child after the war, and then immigrated to Israel in 1972. For several decades, he remained convinced that the miniature Bible had disappeared.

At the end of the war, the survivor Bella Bialik had nevertheless found the book among the ruins of the Lodz ghetto, alongside a small folding Hanukkah menorah. She handed both objects over to Yad Vashem in 1983, without knowing the identity of the author of the Bible.

One year later, after the publication of an article devoted to these objects, a reader contacted Yad Vashem and helped identify Shlomo Knobel. Forty-one years after donating his work, he was thus able to hold it in his hands once again.

Recently, Knobel's son, grandson, and great-grandson found this family item at Yad Vashem, as the latter's bar mitzvah was approaching.

"This encounter with the Bible and with our family history has allowed us to come full circle," said Avi Knobel, Shlomo's son.