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On 15th Avenue in Borough Park yesterday, far below the police helicopters that hovered in the sky, Rabbi Lazer Fogel moved the car seat in the back of his minivan to make room for a group of strangers.
One by one, patrols like this were dispatched to every corner of the neighborhood in search of a missing Hasidic boy who walked out of day camp Monday evening but never made it home.
“Anyone seen a 9-year-old boy?” Fogel called out to some people leaving a house at 12th Avenue and 77th Street, about two miles away from the street corner where Leibby Kletzky was supposed to meet his mother.
Nearly 21 hours had passed, and the exhaustive search was beginning to spread to nearby neighborhoods.
The residents shook their heads, and Fogel and his four new friends soldiered on in the sweltering heat.
Block by block they went, in every driveway and every alley, even behind fences with signs saying, “Beware of Dog.”
They peeked down basement steps and peered in open garages. All they saw were empty alleyways with no real signs of hope.
“Many years ago, there was a girl from here that was lost in Connecticut,” Fogel told his passengers as he wheeled his minivan around a school bus.
Drivers were dropping off kids from camp, kids who made it home, and got an extra hug.
“I was there, too,” Fogel said of the Connecticut search.
“But we found her. She knew to stay in one place.”
Miles away from the spot where Fogel parked, a police van with speakers as big as outdoor flowerpots crawled along 43rd Street blaring details about Itta and Nachman Kletzky’s only son.
The van passed street lamps and storefronts with stapled and taped pictures of the boy.
It passed street corners where little boys rode on bikes.
“I just pictured him somewhere terrified,” said a Hasidic man named Josh, a father of seven, who drove from Queens to the far reaches of Brooklyn to volunteer in the search.
Others were bused in from New Jersey and upstate New York to look under cars and comb through construction sites.
“This is way beyond our community now,” said Assemblyman Dov Hikind, whose initial $5,000 reward contribution swelled to $100,000 in a matter of hours with contributions from the boy’s family, friends and neighbors.
“People just came out and canvassed the area,” Hikind said. “We’re still hoping. Everybody is mobilized and everybody has faith that at the end of the day everything will be OK and we’ll find him.”
Hikind was standing outside the building on 15th Avenue where the boy lives with his parents and four sisters.
Across the street at a command post, set up by the neighborhood Shomrim Safety Patrol, bottles of donated Dasani water were stacked 5 feet high.
Volunteers passed out pastries and free ice cream. The sun beamed down like a laser.
In the command post — an RV that took up one-third of the block — a dispatcher in a leather captain’s chair organized patrols according to a grid. He had been there since 10 p.m. the night before.
“We keep praying and we keep the faith,” he said. “That’s all we can do.”
Fogel and his crew were wrapping up their search. Like the dozens who went out before them, they had nothing good to report. They crossed the street and walked back on the other side, showing the picture and selling hope.
“It’s so scary,” Fogel said, as he wiped his brow and got back in his minivan. “We’re not used to such things.
“At the end of the day, it’s in God’s hands.”