On the windswept shore of Atlantic Beach, on Long Island, merriment was postponed as a bride and groom said a prayer on Sunday for three teenagers kidnapped late last week in the West Bank.
That night, a congregation in the Riverdale section of the Bronx delayed the start of its 40th annual dinner to pray for the boys. On Monday, a synagogue in Flatbush, Brooklyn, did the same at the start of its 92nd anniversary celebration.
Text messages spread, asking strangers and friends to recite Psalm 121, which says that God “will guard you from all evil.”
Jewish groups in New York, often ringing with discordant opinions, have sounded a common note as the days have passed without word of the teenagers — Eyal Yifrach, 19, and Gilad Shaar and Naftali Fraenkel, both 16 — who were all students at yeshivas in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
“It’s scary because it could easily have happened to me,” said Ezra Stern, a 19-year-old from Flatbush who, like many Orthodox Jewish teenagers from New York, studied at a yeshiva near Jerusalem after graduating from high school. “All the Jewish world is connecting to the situation.”
Naftali and Gilad, boarders at a prestigious yeshiva in the Kfar Etzion settlement south of Jerusalem, set out about 10 p.m. on Thursday to hitchhike home for the Sabbath. Gilad is from the settlement of Talmon in the central West Bank. Eyal, from Elad, an ultra-Orthodox town in central Israel, joined them.
One of the boys, Naftali, grew up in Israel but has American citizenship. His aunt, Ittael Fraenkel, has said that he has family in Brooklyn and Monsey, N.Y.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has blamed the Islamic militant group Hamas for the abductions. The boys’ disappearance set off a large Israeli security operation in the West Bank.
The wait for news about the captured boys has been more agonizing than any events in Israel since the Gulf War, said Yaakov Kornreich, of Flatbush, a father of five who has one son living in Israel and a daughter who is moving there with her family of four in a few weeks. “It doesn’t matter if you wear a black yarmulke or a white yarmulke or none at all, this is a priority that tugs at every Jewish heartstring,” Mr. Kornreich said. “These boys are not strangers to us. They’re our kids.”
The kidnappings have resonated especially with parents of teenagers who plan to study at a yeshiva in Israel. Rabbi Josh Kohl, regional director of New York NCSY, a youth group sponsored by the Orthodox Union, has a 17-year-old daughter who may travel to Israel for a year after high school.
Rabbi Kohl said that he worried for her safety, but that the chance to stand alongside Israelis at a tense moment was also part of the draw.
“There is that excitement about being on the front lines of the news,” he said, even if “that comes with its own fears.”
He helped organize a “virtual vigil” that has drawn over 800 participants from as far away as Brazil. Some have pledged to visit a sick friend, others to give charity or study a Torah passage.
Mr. Kornreich said Jewish groups that disagree on politics or doctrine had all been circulating emails with the three boys’ Hebrew names, amended to include the Hebrew name of their mothers in prayers for mercy: Gilad Michael ben Bat Galim; Yaakov Naftali ben Rachel Devorah; and Eyal ben Iris Teshurah.