Time-out on yom tov while missing boy is found

By Jewish Star Staff

As darkness fell Monday evening, the beginning of the eighth day of Pesach, Jews in their yom tov finest — suits, white shirts, even shtreimels — some with flashlights, a few on bicycles, gathered to help Hatzalah and Shomrim volunteers search for a 12-year-old autistic boy who went missing from his Flatbush home.

The boy had last been seen in a white t-shirt, with his Razor scooter, before he vanished. He only answered to his first name, family members said, and he was known to love trains. Hatzalah dispatchers put out a call for help at about 7:00 p.m. Before long volunteers in cars were fanning out in an organized block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood grid search. It was coordinated by Hatzalah and members of the Flatbush Shomrim Safety Patrol from inside a mobile command and communications vehicle that the Shomrim brought to the scene on Avenue P near Coney Island Avenue.

Before long, men, women and teens clutching color flyers with the boy’s picture, name, age and weight were seen searching on foot as far as two miles from the boy’s home. A police helicopter clattered overhead while canine units sniffed the streets for clues to his whereabouts.

“I heard about [the missing boy] in shul,” said Pinchus Morozow, a business owner from Monsey who was spending the holiday in Brooklyn with family members. A short while later, he related, “people stopped by and asked for a flashlight to help with the search. I said to myself, ‘Why am I sitting at home while they’re out searching?’ So I got a flashlight and went to ask for an assignment.”

Like hundreds of others, Morozow, 23, left his family at the dinner table to spend hours searching, first on foot; later in a car with a volunteer from Hatzalah, peering down driveways and examining dead end streets for any sign of the missing boy.

The search ended with good news at about 11:45 p.m. when announcements came over the Hatzalah and Shomrim radio frequencies that the boy had been located in the New York City subway, at the Bronx terminal of the A-line at 207th Street.

Volunteers in cars were instructed to tell searchers on foot that the boy had been found and that they could go home.

As word spread that the search had ended well, about 75 men, among the hundreds of people clustered near the command center on Avenue P, began to dance in a circle, singing, “Chasdei Hashem,” G-d is good. The scene cleared and Pesach 5770 resumed.