The interior was almost entirely covered with magnificent polychromes made in 1740s by the Słuck painter, Chaim ben Yitzchak ha-Levi Segal.

In the beginning of the 20th century, several ethnographic expeditions, by Alexander Miller, S. An-sky and Solomon Yudovin, and by El Lissitzky and Issachar Ber Ryback documented and photographed interiors of the synagogue.

[1] It was located near the intersection of Vyalikaja Hramadzianskaya and Pravaya Naberezhnaya Streets, in the Jewish district of Školišča (literally "School district"), in a place marked today with a symbolic menorah (at the back of the preserved synagogue in Školišča, next to the blue gazebo erected on the occasion of the anniversary of the local water supply company).

Although the work of the carpenter is without artfulness, without imagination, the whole interior of the shul is so perfectly conceived by the painter with only a few uncomplicated colors that an entire grand world lives there and blooms and overflows this small space.

The complete interior of the shul is decorated, starting with the backs of the benches, which cover the length of the walls, all the way to the very pinnacle of the vault.

[6] In 1913, S. An-sky, founder of Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society, together with artist and photographer Solomon Yudovin, also visited Cold Synagogue.

According to published data, attention was drawn to the synagogue and its murals after the 1916 expedition by El Lissitzky and Issachar Ber Ryback, famous representatives of avant-garde art movement, and an article by an influential art critic Rachel Wischnitzer, published in the Volume XI of "History of the Jewish People", "History of the Jewish People in Russia", in 1914 along with several photographs of the paintings.

[12][13] The interior was almost entirely covered with magnificent polychromes made in 1740 by the Slutzk painter Chaim ben Yitzchak ha-Levi Segal.

[14] Segal's murals, made on boards, represented the images of 12 signs of the zodiac, arabesques, mythical animals and cities.

In these unpretentious looking wooden huts, you can admire arabesques, which are rare for such a late time of purity of the drawing, cartouches framing prayer inscriptions of a noble, calm form and impressive grotesque lions on the background of deciduous stains.

This painting is akin to the ornament that was engraved on metal shields during the Renaissance: the same foliage pattern, the same rope gossip, beasts, fantastic gradations in medallions.The twelve signs of the zodiac, usually placed in the medallions, at the top of the dome, are interpreted, for example, in the meaning of the tribes of Israel; heraldic eagles, lions, panthers and deer, typical representatives of the fauna of Asia Minor, whose images are borrowed from middle-aged illustrated manuscripts, from Persian carpets, from engravings of the Renaissance era, are used to visually explain the sacred texts.

They toured a number of cities and towns of the Belarusian Dnieper region and Lithuania in order to identify and fix on photo the monuments of Jewish antiquity.

Here is his first impression of what he saw: "No, this was something different from that first surprise I received when I visited the Roman basilicas, the Gothic cathedrals, the Baroque churches of Germany, France, and Italy.

"[5] Lissitzky's assessment of the skill of Chaim Segal is also very different in comparison with that given by Rachel Wischnitzer: "The treasury of forms used by the painter is inexhaustible.

"[16] Further, about Chaim Segal, El Lissitzky mentions a common legend told about the old masters who created a kind of miracle: "People say that he painted three shuls.

Is that not a rabbinical face in the lion's head in the zodiac paintings of the Mogilev Shul?From the frieze blossoms forth a giant plant-ornamentation, which encircles the entire ceiling in a ring.

On the sides are two panels—to the left on the southern wall a "vormayse", depicting the cursed city of Worms encircled by some kind of dragon, and a tree of life.

On the triangles that mask the transition from the walls to the ceiling, on one of them, in the northwest, the shorabor, the ox that will be eaten in paradise; on the other side, in the northeast, a wild goat; on the third, in the southeast, the leviathan and on the fourth, in the southwest, an elephant with a palanquin on its back.

[21] "Of course, one can regret the sketchiness of the drawing," writes Ruth Apter-Gabriel, and one of her explanations is the artist's desire to convey the idea of the plot of the ceiling painting as a whole.

Lissitzky and Ryback also visited the synagogue of Kopys, located 50 km north of Mogilev, with very similar decoration by the hand of the same master - Chaim Segal.

1 and 15 from the Ma’aseh nissim (Hebrew: Story of Wonders),[24] tales of Juspa Schammes[e] of the Worms Synagogue, written in 1670 and published for the first time in 1696 in Amsterdam.

[32] Historian Shlomo Eidelberg of the Yeshiva University in New York notes that on the mural of the Cold Synagogue the name "Worms" on the tower was spelled the same way as in Juspa's book - ווירמש.

Art historian Ilia Rodov of Bar-Ilan University notes that "Juspa’s tale is a version of the popular German legend relating that the dragon of Worms was slain by Siegfried.

Hayim Segal’s terrible dragon with a red eye and a long arrow-like tongue is thus a personification of divine anger punishing the town.

Segal ends the Worms legend on a happy note, looking to a time when no Jew will prefer exile to life in the Holy Land.

"[29] In 1937 Belarusian Soviet writers Jurka Vićbič and Źmitrok Biadula visited Mogilev; they found the Cold Synagogue in deteriorated state.

In 1937 I had to visit it together with Samuil Plavnik, a former pupil of the Jewish theological seminary - Yeshibot, who became one of the most popular Belarusian writers under the pseudonym Źmitrok Biadula.

Even from a distance, we recognized it by its high, multi-layered roof with curved slopes, which defines the characteristic silhouette of most synagogues in Belarus.

During its long existence, it, modest in size, contained a sea of human grief, which on the holiday of Yom Kippur was illuminated with a joyful exclamation of hope under the sounds of a ritual horn - shofar: Lshono Gaboa Biyrushalaym!

Unusual for synagogues in general, the wall painting here, bypassing the prohibitions of the Talmud, filled the entire building with inspirational symbols of the biblical prophets, now covered below... with obscene inscriptions in charcoal and chalk.