in Croatia and abroad. In October 1941, the newly installed mayor of Zagreb, Ivan Werner, issued a decree ordering the demolition of the Praška Street synagogue, ostensibly because it did not fit into the city's master plan. The demolition began on October 10, 1941, proceeding slowly so as not to damage the adjacent buildings; it was finished by April 1942. The whole process was photographed for propaganda purposes, and the photographs were shown to the public at an antisemitic exhibition first held in Zagreb. It was also shown in Dubrovnik, Karlovac, Sarajevo, Vukovar and Zemun, as an illustration of the "solution of the Jewish question in Croatia". A fragment of the film footage of the demolition was discovered five decades later by the film director Lordan Zafranović during research for his 1993 documentary feature, Decline of the Century: Testimony of L. Z.; 41 seconds of the film survives. This footage was also shown in Mira Wolf's documentary, The Zagreb Synagogue 1867-1942 (1996), produced by Croatian Radiotelevision. The synagogue's eight valuable Torah scrolls were saved due to an intervention by Leonardo Grivičić, an entrepreneur and industrialist who lived next door from Mile Budak, a minister in the Ustaša government. He was also close to Poglavnik Ante Pavelić and the Third Reich's ambassador to Croatia, Edmund Glaise-Horstenau. Although Grivičić did not have a significant political role in the Independent State of Croatia, he was considered trustworthy. On October 9, 1941, he learned about the regime's plan to start the demolition of the synagogue on the following morning. By that evening, Grivičić secretly relayed the information to the synagogue's chief cantor, Grüner, and during the night, the Torah scrolls were moved to safety. Shortly after the destruction of the synagogue, the Catholic archbishop of Zagreb Aloysius Stepinac delivered a homily in which he said: "A house of God of any faith is a holy thing, and whoever harms it will pay with their lives. In this world and the next they will be punished.". The only surviving fragments of the building — the wash-basin and two memorial tables from the forecourt, as well as some parts of a column — were saved by Ivo Kraus. He pulled them from the rubble shortly after the end of World War II. The wash-basin and the memorial tables are now in the Zagreb City Museum. The column fragments are kept by the Jewish Community of Zagreb.