A Torah scroll has two wooden rollers, the trees of life, and the ends that project above the parchment are where the ornaments go. Rimonim are the pair that sit on those ends when the scroll is dressed. The name means pomegranates and the earliest recorded forms follow the fruit, but the type that spread most widely across Europe and the Mediterranean is architectural: a shaft carrying tiers of open arcading, sometimes several storeys of it, topped with a finial, and hung about with small bells on wire loops. When the scroll is lifted and carried through the synagogue the bells sound, and the congregation stands to that sound before it sees the scroll.
The ornaments are a family rather than a fixed set. A crown covers both staves at once and is used instead of rimonim in many communities; a breastplate hangs on the front of a dressed scroll in Ashkenazi practice; a pointer, the yad, is used to follow the text without touching the parchment. In North African, Middle Eastern and Italian communities the scroll is kept in a rigid case rather than dressed in a mantle, and the rimonim are then set on top of the case, so the same object serves two quite different systems of housing the same text. Almost all of this metalwork is donated, and dedicatory inscriptions on it name donors, dates and occasions, which makes synagogue silver a documentary record as well as a liturgical one.