Six Days and Seven Gates

"An extended poem by Yitzhak Navon, describing the “spiritual conversation” in Hebrew of Jerusalem’s Old City gates during the Six-Day War. Designed, hand-printed, and hand-bound by Yehuda Miklaf, based on lithographs by Arie Azen.

This book happened because I was a friend of Victor Navon, Yitzhak's brother, who was an amateur book binder who learned with me. The book had been published in another format, and Victor and I decided to do a fancy version of it.

I wasn't happy with the way the computer placed the Hebrew vowel points, so I rearranged the entire text and put the points in what I considered to be the proper place. I was lucky to have a friend who had worked with Ariel Wardi, and he knew all the codes to move things in a text, according to my taste. Then I created photopolymer blocks, and I printed the text from those blocks, as well as all of the illustrations. The entire book was printed from photopolymer.

It was an edition of 75 copies, of which three were bound in a design binding, two of which are in the Rare Book Library of Yale University and the Rare Book Library of Harvard University. This one is still in my possession. This binding was made with images from Lion's Gate, which was the gate from which the soldiers went into the Old City of Jerusalem during the 1967 Israel war."

The description of this book is transcribed from conversations between Yehuda Miklaf and Shiraz Grinbaum held in January 2026. The collection of the legendary Jerusalem bookbinder was photographed especially for the website by Yair Meyuhas. Miklaf's collection includes Design Bindings created over more than 40 years.