Antiques - NYTimes.com Black Jews started forming Harlem congregations in the 1910s, based on the conviction that Africans were descended from ancient Hebrews and that Christianity was a religion imposed on them during enslavement in America. But few traces of their presence remain in the neighborhood. Last month the documentary filmmaker Marlaine Glicksman stood outside that group's elaborate former synagogue, an 1890s brick town house on West 123rd Street at Mount Morris Park West that was originally built for a baking-soda tycoon. The congregation, amid controversy among factions, sold it to a developer in 2007. The writers James Fenton and Darryl Pinckney are now turning it into their home. Ms. Glicksman has spent two decades making a film about the Jews who worshiped there, the Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. She attended countless services in its sanctuary. Hebrew letters and Commandment tablets, now faded into illegibility, were painted on the windowpanes. She remembers the smell of kosher soul food wafting up from the kitchen at the back. She pointed out scrawled Hebrew letters and Stars of David on the raw lumber boards that block the arched doorway as the building is under renovation. "It's really an amazing wall," she said, the graffiti itself worthy of recording and display. Her film in progress, called "The Commandment Keepers," will be screened on April 17 at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. It traces the congregation's history, from the early black rabbis" sermons and writings about their commitment to Jewish rituals to their followers" persistence in the face of racism and anti-Semitism. During the recent visit Ms. Glicksman turned away from the former synagogue and set off to pore through Commandment Keepers archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. She keeps turning up material to add to the film, which will require $100,000 to complete. In a portfolio of 1960s photographs by Larence Shustak, she leafed through close-ups of black hands on Torahs and menorah candlelight flickering before a black boy in a prayer shawl. Uncaptioned snapshots in another file contained image after image of Ms. Glicksman's interviewees over the decades, some of whom have since died. In a stack of congregation newsletters, Ms. Glicksman turned to a black columnist's prediction that anti-Semites would harass the Commandment Keepers "as we become more affluent." Another newsletter reported on a Brooklyn yeshiva that had expelled a black cantor's sons for not having what mainstream Judaism considered the correct lineage. The Harlem historian John T. Reddick had joined Ms. Glicksman for the Schomburg browsing; he is working on an exhibition about influential entertainers among the neighborhood's blacks and Jews. "It's like a ball of yarn," Mr. Reddick said of multiracial, interdenominational research projects like theirs. When do you stop? Because you keep finding. The scattered black Jews in New York have kept much of their collections of ritual objects, Rabbi Sholomo Ben Levy, a historian who leads a Queens congregation that grew out of the Commandment Keepers, said in a recent phone interview. The Glicksman film shows the last moments of Harlem togetherness, just before the diaspora. "Little did Marlaine know when she started the project," Rabbi Levy said, "that it would become such an important historical piece." The American Museum of Natural History has documented where its cedar totem poles have traveled over the years, from Alaskan and Washington State coastal villages to various spots around the institution's own Manhattan corridors. Vintage interior shots show the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians in different configurations, with the carved mythical creatures posed atop display cases and mounted on columns and walls. The poles have suffered from their exposure; the ground-floor hall is a major circulation route near the West 77th Street entrance. "There's so much dust that's evolved," said Judith Levinson, the museum's director of conservation. With $300,000 in government and foundation grants, her department has been analyzing and stabilizing 77 carvings plagued by grime, cracks, rot, old insect burrows and erosion at the hands of curious schoolchildren. A few poles have been hauled to her lab upstairs, but one set of four, each about 18 feet tall, was too large to remove. Conservators set up a curtained alcove in the gallery and took the poles there with rigging equipment. Syringe and swab treatments revealed their original chisel marks, white claws and teeth, red mouths and blue face paint. When they were hoisted back up, "they really just came alive," Ms. Levinson said. The collection will not, however, receive complete face-lifts. "We didn't want to make it sort of fraudulent," she said. Fissures formed by Pacific Northwest rain have been narrowed somewhat but left visible. Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia has been collecting clocks since the Rockefellers set up the town in the 1930s, while scholarship about the gears and elaborate cases continues to evolve. For a show that opens on April 7, "Keeping Time: The Tall Case Clock," the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum in Colonial Williamsburg has brought out the products of recent buying sprees and research. A 1730s clock movement has turned out to be missing some brass flourishes, perhaps because an owner had modernist tastes. Descendants of the original owners of an 1810s clock made in South Carolina, which Colonial Williamsburg acquired in 2010, said the mahogany case was dinged during the Civil War. The family treasured it enough to load it onto their wagon while fleeing Union soldiers. American timepiece scholarship is bristling with news. Books and exhibitions recently completed or in progress focus on topics as narrow as "American Wooden Movement Tall Clocks, 1712-1835"; manufacturers in Windsor, Conn.; and the Philadelphia artisan Peter Stretch. Frank L. Hohmann III, a private investor and clock collector in New York, has worked with the Winterthur Museum historian Donald L. Fennimore to track down 85 of the 100 clocks that Stretch's family is believed to have made. For a book due out this year, researchers took 50 field trips. At Stretch's English birthplace, in Leek, Staffordshire, Mr. Hohmann said he "was treated like a visiting dignitary" and introduced to a descendant named Peter Stretch. The Windsor Historical Society has found 16 locally made clocks so far, to be included in a publication next year. This month researchers discovered an account book reference to the 18th-century Windsor politician Oliver Ellsworth's buying a clock case made by his neighbor Thomas Hayden. The next step, said Christina Vida, the society's curator, is to see if descendants know what happened to the Ellsworth-Hayden clock.