the Jews of Satanow walked to their Great Synagogue on the hill where the Torah Ark was elaborately embellished with the best that Jewish rococo could provide. Painted gryphons stretched their leathery wings against an azure ground, the intense blue still visible even in the days of deepest ruin. Above the gryphons, surmounting the tablet of the Decalogue, a complicated, elegant decoration of swag and scroll rises to a pair of lions, holding between them the Keter Torah, the only crown that mattered to these Jews. All this splendour might have fallen before the People’s Bulldozers in the
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