Two monuments of Jurborg are described in the text - the former synagogue from the 18th century, built thanks to the local merchant Ick Taube. It is already mentioned in Gloger's encyclopaedia. In addition, the old manor house is also mentioned. A detailed description of the building follows (Source: "Ziemia. Tygodnik Krajoznawczy Ilustrowany', Warsaw 1910, no. 33, pp. 6-7, after: Wielkopolska Biblioteka Cyfrowa).

A modernised reading of the text

Two monuments of Jurborg.

Approaching Jurborg from Kaunas by steamboat on the Nemunas river, just a couple of lightweights away, you can see dominating almost over the town a very original building, resembling in its general outline some kind of Chinese or Manchurian pagoda.

It is a former synagogue dating back to the middle of the 18th century, built, as the Hebrew inscriptions in the interior proclaim, at the expense and effort of the local merchant Ide Taube around 1759. Looking at this highly distinctive building, the words of our bard come to mind involuntarily:

"Old, according to an old pattern built, Which was invented from Tyrian carpenters, And then the Jews spread it over the world: A kind of architecture unknown to foreign builders; we inherit it from the Jews. ...The roof is made of bastard fabrics and straw, pointy, overhanging, bent as a Jewish cap is torn... In a word - an old building, wobbling, crooked, like a Jew when he prays: The roof like a cap, like a thatched beard, The walls smoky and dirty, like a black tyre And the front porch sticks out, like a boob on the forehead".

In his Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Antiquity, Zygmunt Gloger mentions this synagogue as a highly original monument of past times, without, however, providing a drawing. Our recently deceased collector and archaeologist Matys Bersohn took great interest in it, collecting ancient monuments of Jewish settlement in Poland. As an outstanding and most typical example of rural buildings made of wood, so widespread in all of Lithuania and White Russia years ago, we present here an old manor house of an old type, which can be found less and less frequently in the present times of cosmopolitanism, and in view of frequent fires, which often consume entire villages, settlements and towns, built of such inflammable material as old, dry, well-dried and tarry wood.

It is a matter of regret that the general type and character of wooden buildings has become so template-like and conventional in our country that our builders seem to have carefully avoided everything that is the main and essential type of this kind of building, be it in the ornamentation and joints of the hinges or in the crossing and decoration of the beams. And yet it is such a graceful material! It is enough to look at the two huge porches with eaves, half of which is a spacious and comfortable hallway, at the columns and barricades with turned granny feet, at the clean-cut doors and the white window frames against the background of the walls made of round logs, to see that our grandparents knew how to combine aesthetic considerations with comfort and necessity.

Today, builders are erecting (mostly) some kind of miraculous toilets in the Norwegian, Swiss or Russian style, or God knows what, completely ignoring the domestic motifs, which are adapted to our climate and local conditions.