To Rabbi Aryeh Citron, who leads the minyan, they were what brought it to life: Ainsworth held down a spot in the kitchen, his siddur always in the same place atop a cabinet. Cohen always came bearing a d’var Torah (brief lesson on the Torah portion). And Rosenberg, though less of a regular, was the minyan’s sharpest dresser.

“If anybody doesn’t remember who he is because they don’t remember his name,” Citron said, “just describe him as wearing a perfectly pressed white shirt, because he always wore that.”

The absence of two or three congregants might not be felt numerically for a few weeks. Turnout has been strong in the two Shabbats since the collapse.

But the emotional void already feels immense at a shul too small for regulars not to know each other.

“Walking in, knowing that you were missing two people that were regulars, is shocking,” said Moises Wertheimer, a travel agent who has attended the minyan ever since he moved into Champlain Towers North with his family nine years ago. “It’s sad, shocking, weird, disturbing.”

Wertheimer did not know Brad Cohen well, despite swimming laps a lane over from him in the Champlain pool. But the Shabbat before the collapse, the two wound up walking back from minyan together. They ended up standing outside the building talking for about 30 minutes, about triathlon training and their families, before going their separate ways. It was their only conversation.

“That’s another part of the shock,” Wertheimer said. “Even though I wasn’t so close with him. But every time we daven [pray] together, he was the Kohen.”

When Wertheimer’s wife woke him up with the news just before 2 a.m. on June 24, he threw on his Hatzalah emergency-services uniform and went straight to the disaster site to help. He didn’t return home until reinforcements arrived six hours later.

As the Torah reading concluded on this past Shabbat, Wertheimer rose to the bimah to recite Birkat HaGomel, the blessing said upon surviving peril. Then Citron said a prayer for the rescue of the missing members.

Even as his usual spot in the kitchen remained unoccupied, Tzvi Ainsworth — “Reb Tzvi,” as Citron referred to him — was present in the service: Citron was reading from his Torah scroll. And a discovery at the first Shabbat after the collapse invested it with new meaning.

According to Citron, Ainsworth had ordered silver adornments, rimonim for the scroll, only to discover they didn’t fit.

“He messaged me Tuesday — ‘I have the crowns. They don’t fit on the sefer. Should I leave them on or bring them home?’” Citron recalled. The rabbi replied five minutes later: Leave them at the shul.

But he had already left with the ornaments. “I’ll bring them before Shabbos,’” he told Citron.

When the building collapsed, Citron assumed the crowns were lost. But when the ark was opened before services started on Saturday morning, the rimonim were there, shining atop the scrolls.

Reb Tzvi had brought them back.

In his sermon, Citron expounded on the righteousness of his missing congregants. Like Pinchas, the hero of the week’s Torah portion, Ainsworth and Cohen embodied the daily grind of devout Judaism — they dwelled among the people, and lived to serve their peers with holiness and commitment. They were always on time for services, Citron said with a smile, which made it possible for him to arrive late every once in a while.

It was the same kind of devotion, he said, that earned Pinchas the priesthood, that meant he and his descendants would be kohanim — an office suddenly vacant at the Surfside Minyan, a presence that would take a clear and open miracle to restore.