About an hour before the saddest event ever in Bor ough Park, the sky dark ened to a deep shade of purple and filled the streets with rain.
Already, a thick crowd was filling the street outside Congregation Heichel Hatfilah on 56th Street, like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
No one seemed to mind the storm. It helped hide the tears.
“The heavens are also crying,” said Shimon Katzman, a Borough Park resident.
SEE HOW LEIBY’S MISSED TURN ENDED IN A NIGHTMARE
Katzman was one of the thousands of people shoehorned into the narrow street to mourn the death of a little boy and the innocence that followed him to the grave.
Like nearly every man in Borough Park with a pulse and black shoes, Katzman had enlisted in the army of volunteers who launched a massive manhunt for a missing 8-year-old boy that ended in unspeakable tragedy early yesterday.
“Here lies my child. Purity of heart. Very quiet and very respectful. Satisfied and never demanding,” Leiby Kletzky’s father, Nachman Kletzky, told his fellow mourners at the funeral last night.
“My child is gone.”
The devastated father said he was struggling with “very deep sorrow,” but he hoped some good could come from the horror.
“We must gather our strength and see what we can do for other Jews. We have to show love and give to others,” Kletzky said.
Rabbi Benjamin Eisenberger told the mourners, “I see and appreciate the love from the community. Love emanates from the community and God. We must continue to show support from family.”
Down the block, the street was littered with missing-person fliers that had been handed out a day earlier.
The printed pieces of hope shared space near the curb with paper cups, candy wrappers and other debris.
Motty Jay was another community member who’d been walking along 13th Avenue handing out pictures of the missing boy he never knew.
He said he’d had a tiny feeling in the back of his mind that the ending of Leiby’s story might not be a happy one, but he never imagined anything like this, with pieces of the boy’s body found in two different places.
“Who in their right mind would even think something like this would happen?” Jay asked.
For many in Borough Park, the horror of young Leiby’s death was compounded by news that the suspect, Levi Aron, was a Jewish neighbor, not that a murderer of another faith would have eased the pain.
But it did mean that the insular nature of a highly protective community might have to be reexamined. The gates that keep the crazies out might actually be keeping them in.
“I don’t know what to think,” said another man who had labored in the search. His face was as white and ashen as the shirt that hung from his shoulders.
“I never thought it would be one of our own. That means we have to protect our children from the inside as well as the outside.”