New London — As snow fell heavily outside, 17-year-old Baruch-Lev Kelman was inside poring over silver.

With a magnifying glass in one hand, Kelman examined the inscription on a yad, a pointer used to read the Torah.

"These pieces, you know, before the war, before they were taken from their communities in Europe by the Germans, these pieces — they had lives of their own, and they were part of people's lives and their belief systems, and now I want to make them live again," Kelman said Sunday.

He and several other members of his Boy Scout Troop 54, which is based in the Boston area, are working to translate inscriptions and interpret items from the Coast Guard Academy's Holocaust silver collection. Kelman's troop came to the area about three years ago for a camping trip and found out about the museum, and later, the collection of silver, which includes items such as a menorah, a Kiddush cup and candle holders.

The silver, part of a cache hidden during World War II, was never claimed and was later sold at an auction benefitting Jewish refugees. The New London Jewish community is believed to have purchased the silver sometime in the 1950s. It then gifted the items to the academy in recognition of the Coast Guard's involvement in World War II.

The collection of 16 pieces of silver Judaica has never been on permanent display — it's brought out annually on Holocaust Remembrance Day but then put back in storage — without proper historical context and relevance to the Coast Guard, museum curator Jen Gaudio said. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has asked Gaudio to allow the scouts to borrow the collection to display alongside the museum's new Judaica collection.

Kelman's troop is chartered to the Maimonides School, a Jewish day school in Brookline, Mass., so the scouts can read Hebrew and have knowledge of Jewish objects. He's using the project to qualify for Eagle Scout, the highest rank in the Boy Scouts. The intention is to fully inform the museum about the pieces so that they can be put on public display.

An added side benefit, Gaudio said, would be re-establishing connections with the New London Jewish community and documenting the experience of Jewish Coast Guard service men and women.

Kelman, along with Boy Scouts Aaron Sokolinski, 17, and Shmuly Shimanovich, 12, traveled to New London from the Boston area Sunday with their Scout Master Howard Spielman and his wife, Eileen Spielman, a Boy Scouts committee member, to prepare the items for cataloguing next Sunday. A handful of Boy Scouts are helping Kelman with the project, and eventually each will be assigned an item to research. The work is expected to take several weeks.

Kelman is not sure if the silver is all from the same place, so the scouts will work to determine its origins.  He, Sokolinski and Schimanovich were debating what kind of birds top the rimonim, which is used to decorate the case that holds the Torah. If they are eagles, the rimonim could be a symbol of either Austro-Hungary or Germany, Kelman said. If they are falcons, the rimonim could be Polish, he mused.

j.bergman@theday.com