LAKEWOOD NATIVE MISSING AFTER JERUSALEM HIKING TRIP

Another student - this one from New Jersey's Lakewood neighborhood - has gone missing, leading to more fears you can guess:

Israeli police said Tuesday they are searching for a young New Jersey religious student who disappeared during a hike in a forest outside Jerusalem last week.

Aaron Sofer, 23, of Lakewood, N.J., has been missing since Friday, when he went on a hike with a friend in the Jerusalem Forest, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Rosenfeld said police have launched an extensive search for Sofer, an ultra-Orthodox student at a yeshiva, a Jewish religious school. Sofer's parents have flown to Israel.

Shlomo Sofer, Aaron's cousin, criticized the search response and called on the Israeli military to get involved. He told FoxNews.com roughly 500 people took part in searches of the Beit Zayit area of the woods on Tuesday. [...]

"This is a young, American student who came to Israel to spend a year or two here," he said. "And there's no reason to assume he has committed suicide or has done anything silly or immature. We feel they should be taking further measures in terms of investigating a possible abduction."

The fears of kidnapping are very legitimate in these tense times, so they better continue to act serious about this. It's bad enough the reaction to the kidnapping of the 3 yeshiva students 2 months ago was awful. They should not make the same mistake here.