Princeton Echo Online (BETA)

By Abigail Klionsky

In the past 10 years, Jewish high school students from Princeton, Lawrenceville and other nearby towns have donated $391,745 to nearly 50 local, national and international organizations through the Jewish Community Youth Foundation.

The foundation, under the auspices of Princeton-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services, is an education-based program for Jewish students in eighth grade through senior year of high school that aims to provide hands-on learning experiences in philanthropic giving.

Geoffrey Altman (from Princeton), Jess Russo (Lawrence), Leah Falcon (Princeton), Leanna Glass (Lawrence) and Mason Russo (Lawrence) are among current participants in the Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Greater Mercer County Jewish Community Youth Foundation.

The program was founded by Ricky Shechtel, who was raised by parents devoted to philanthropy. Shechtel and her husband worked hard to instill those same values in their own three children.

“When you’ve had a rich Jewish education, [philanthropy is] part of your DNA,” Shechtel said.

Shechtel recognized the power of introducing philanthropy at a young age. She began to research ways to bring philanthropy to a wider audience of Jewish youth, and the result was the JCYF program, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.

Shechtel said JCYF combines the Jewish values of “tzedakah” (charity) and “tikkun olam” (repairing the world) to teach teens to be “productive members of the Jewish community.” She hopes that JCYF will teach participants “to be involved in nonprofits not just with their money, but with their actions.”

Each grade consists of two cohorts composed of 20 teens each. According to Celeste Albert, the program’s coordinator, the students represent 12 elementary schools, 22 high schools and 16 synagogues, a diversity that is a draw for many participants.

“I met many friends through [JCYF] who I would not have met otherwise,” wrote Mason Russo, a senior at Lawrence High School, in an email.

Peri Feldstein, a sophomore from Princeton, said that JCYF is also “a learning experience in a social setting.” For many participants, JCYF is a way of staying involved in the Jewish community after they have celebrated their bar and bat mitzvahs.

In total, each group of 20 students donates $7,200 every year, a figure funded by a combination of each student’s own $120 contribution and matching donations per participant from both the Jewish Federation of Princeton Mercer Bucks and the Ricky and Andrew J. Shechtel Philanthropic Fund. The students meet between four and six times each year to learn about philanthropy and to discuss how to distribute their funds among the various organizations applying for grants. Each group is advised by two adults, who facilitate discussions at monthly meetings.

Judaism is an essential component of the JCYF curriculum. As early as eighth grade, participants learn about the eight-rung “ladder of giving” devised by 12th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides. The ladder considers helping someone become self-sufficient as the highest form of giving.

“Using your Jewish beliefs helps you focus more,” said Abby Park, a senior at Lawrence High School.

“We each, as Jews, are only caretakers of our individual wealth. It is on loan to us from God, so giving it away is an act of justice,” Shechtel said.

It is that dedication to justice that the program’s advisers hope to impress upon participants.

Marni Blitz, who began advising a group of eighth graders and has followed them through to their senior year, hopes that JCYF “will plant the seeds for a lifetime of philanthropic giving and an understanding that this is part of their obligations as being part of a community.”

The majority of organizations from which JCYF accepts grant proposals are Jewish ones.

“Of course, you have to look out for the world, but you have to look out for yourself and your community,” Feldstein said.

Still, many organizations distribute aid to non-Jewish recipients, and a few of the organizations are not Jewish at all.

“We look at who can be impacted the most,” Park said. “I would like it to go to a Jewish organization, but if there are people who are at risk or in trouble, I’d obviously like those people to be helped first.”

That sentiment echoes the progressive nature of the JCYF curriculum, which allows teens to explore philanthropy on local and international levels. Eighth graders receive proposals from local organizations, while ninth graders take on a national focus.

In 10th grade, participants contribute to Jewish arts and culture organizations, and the following year to organizations that do outreach and advocacy work. The program culminates with an emphasis on Israel.

In addition to teaching teens about the value of charity, JCYF aims to help teens distinguish between “just donating your money, and really giving back,” according to Rebecca Kaufman, an adviser who commutes from New York City for the monthly meetings. “It’s about being a responsible human being,” Kaufman said.

“You don’t need to be rich and as old as I am to stand up and be counted as part of the community,” Shechtel said.

Which is why, by their second meeting in early November, participants were already reviewing grant proposals. In the remaining sessions, they will conduct site visits to their potential beneficiaries and decide how to allocate their $7,200.

“What’s great about the program is, it’s really the teens’ decision,” Kaufman said.

The participants agree.

“It’s not just a bunch of people lecturing you,” Park said.

The advisers moderate discussions, but “have no say in where the money’s going,” she said.

“It’s a lot of showing each other what we learned and then deciding what cause and what program is most effective,” Feldstein explained.

Park added that the participants’ mentalities change over the years.

“You have that notion in eighth grade of thinking you come in with [$320], so you can decide where that goes,” she said. Now, as seniors, “you realize you’re pooling a bigger amount for everyone.”

At the end of each year, the participants host a ceremony to present checks to all the receiving organizations. As the associate director of Princeton University’s Center for Jewish Life, Blitz was on the receiving end of the grant in 2008; the Allocations Ceremony is what convinced her to become an adviser the next year.

“I was so impressed by the students,” she said. “They were so focused and so articulate in wanting to help the community in their philanthropic endeavors.”

Participants gain not only valuable hands-on experience in the world of philanthropy, but also critical life skills.

“This has made me a good contributor to group discussions,” Russo said. “Being able to work in a group environment and to lead discussions is an important part of daily life,” he added.

Leah Falcon, a senior at Princeton Day School, said she has learned “how to voice my own opinions as well as listen to the opinions of others.”

Learning how to partake in group decisions has been among the most valuable lessons learned so far for Park, as well.

“As I’ve gone through the program, I’ve seen that people’s ideas are just as good as mine and they might make a valid point that some other organization might be more deserving [than my favorite cause],” she said.

Reflecting on her experiences thus far, Feldstein said, “Donating your time and your money is a big mitzvah, and something that I know I’m going to want to continue in my life. And it’s good to have a basis for how to do so properly.”

For more information on the Jewish Community Youth Foundation, contact program coordinator Celeste Albert at (609) 987-8100 or go online to the JCYF website, jfcsonline.org/jcyf.html.

By Diccon Hyatt

A study led by a Princeton scientist has provided the strongest evidence yet that life on earth could have arrived on a rock plunging from outer space.

Princeton University researcher Edward Belbruno and his colleagues published an article in the journal Astrophysics theorizing that earth could have been bombarded with about 3 billion times as much rubble from other planets than was previously believed. The paper gives a major boost to one hypothesis about how the earliest microorganisms came to exist on the hostile environment of the young earth. With more interstellar debris comes a greater chance the earth was “seeded” with life from afar.

The idea of lithopanspermia, or the distribution of life throughout the universe via rocks, goes back to at least 1874. Scientists have long studied the possibility that meteors, ejected by volcanoes or celestial impacts from planets where life existed, bore the elements of life or even simple organisms over the gulf of space, and may have jump-started the formation of life on Earth.

For lithopanspermia to be true, Earth would have to have been hit by countless meteors originating from distant planets, and those meteors would have had to contain at least the chemical elements of life, if not life itself. Until now, it seemed unlikely that the first part of this equation was plausible.

That’s because previous theories held that most rocks escaping any given solar system would be traveling at rocket-like speeds of 18,000 miles per hour. Something that fast would have a miniscule chance of striking the Earth.

Therefore, scientists believed that even if the solar system had been close to another star in its early days, only tens of large rocks from the other star could have possibly come into the system from its neighbor, with maybe one or two hitting the Earth. Although scientists agree that Earth was pulverized with rocks billions of years ago in a time known as the “Heavy Bombardment,” it was thought most of these meteors came from inside the solar system.

But what if the ejection from another star was more of a slow lob than a cannon shot? Slow rocks would be drawn into the solar system by gravity, where fast rocks would zoom past.

Belbruno, working with colleagues from the University of Arizona and the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain, explored the possibility that rocks could be traded between planets and star systems at far slower speeds of about 100 meters per second, about the speed of a racecar, via a mechanism called “weak transfer.”

Belbruno first described objects in a “weak stability boundary” in 1986, when he was a young mathematician working for NASA’S Jet Propulsion Lab, devising spacecraft trajectories.

How his weak transfer idea came to be accepted by the scientific community is a story in itself.

Belbruno recalled that at that time he came up with it, his job wasn’t going well. Belbruno had invented a new way to steer NASA space missions. He reasoned that if a ship could be positioned in a slow orbit around a celestial object such that it was on the verge of drifting off into space, it would only take a tiny nudge with an engine burning a negligible amount of fuel to send the craft off to a new destination – the moon, Mars, Jupiter, or anywhere, really.

He figured if the trajectory was right, it was even possible for the nudge not to come from the spaceship’s engines, but from the subtle gravitational tug of a distant planet or moon. In a field where every pound of fuel lifted into space costs thousands of dollars, Belbruno had just discovered how to get a free ride, surfing on the tides of chaos.

But Belbruno’s colleagues were not impressed, he remembered, partly because such a meandering journey through space would be extremely slow, even if it worked. The traditional method for traveling to the moon was to go virtually straight at it, then use rockets to slow down. The direct path from the earth to the moon took days, but Belbruno’s method took two years.

It took a crisis to make everyone realize that Belbruno’s “weak transfer” method not only worked, but was useful.

“In 1990, I was sort of politely asked to leave,” Belbruno said. “On the particular day I decided not to pursue it anymore, that’s when some engineer knocked on my door and said the Japanese had one of their small spacecraft go on a transfer [to the moon] and they lost it. The mothership was going around the earth and had hardly any fuel, and they wanted to rescue it … it was at that moment that a flash of insight hit me, and I said, ‘I know how to rescue that spacecraft.’”

Computer simulations showed it would work, but Belbruno was as surprised as anyone when they tried it, and it was a success.

The rescue of the Hiten space probe in 1991 was a turning point in Belbruno’s career and the idea of weak transfer.

“If that particular guy did not knock on my door that day with this proposal, I would not be here talking to you right now. My work would have ended because I would have left JPL without having done any useful work to show for four years except computer results,” Belbruno said.

After that, Belbruno studied the implications of weak transfer on celestial objects rather than spacecraft.

In 2004, Belbruno had a conversation with Princeton Astrophysics chair David Spergel that set off an eight-year research project. Belbruno credits Spergel with making him realize that if a spacecraft or a comet could change orbits with so little energy, so too could a smallish rock, and that this might have implications for lithopanspermia.

Belbruno at first thought making the calculations would be easy, and he would be done with the paper fairly quickly. But he soon realized he needed to supplement his expertise in orbital mechanics with detailed knowledge of the conditions that would have been needed for lithopanspermia to occur. He enlisted the help of Amaya Moro-Martín, an astronomer at CAB and a Princeton visiting research collaborator in astrophysical sciences and Renu Malhotra, a professor of planetary sciences at Arizona, who became co-authors of the paper.

The team, working over eight years, fleshed out the details of how slow space rocks could have traversed the void between the stars.

Because the speeds of weak transfer are so low, the process would only work with star systems in very close proximity, and right now, the solar system is isolated, with its closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, being 4.2 light years away. This distance is much too far for any rocks to be exchanged via weak transfer.

It is thought that the sun was once part of a cluster of stars packed relatively close together. The paper notes that since the earliest evidence for life on earth is as old as 3.8 billion years ago, when the earth was 718 million years old, and the latest possible time for the sun leaving its stellar nursery was 300 million years later, it is conceivable that billions of rocks hit the Earth during that time.

The researchers decided to further investigate the slow transfer scenario by running a computer simulation. Princeton graduate student Dmitry Svransky ran a Monte Carlo simulation — calculating millions of trajectories at once — that supported Belbruno’s hypothesis.

The paper concludes that overall, about 300 million possible lithopanspermia events could have occurred between Earth and a planet in a nearby star system, noting the possibility that Earth seeded another planet as well as the other way around.

The evidence is compelling enough that Belbruno believes it’s a likely possibility.

“Based on my experience doing this research, I believe now that is likely that the raw materials necessary for life to have evolved on the earth came from rocks which were ejected from other planets,” he said.

The paper, “Chaotic Exchange of Solid Material between Planetary Systems: Implications for Lithopanspermia,” was published Sept. 12 by Astrobiology, and was supported by grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Ministry of Science and Innovation in Spain.

By Elaine Strauss

In the spring, Ben Taub took a chance on his singing by entering the auditions for NBC’s talent reality show “The Voice” and it paid off with odds at the order of more than 1,500 to one.

The aspiring vocalist made it to the show and got the chance to perform on national TV. Although he was eliminated from the competition Oct. 16, he can look back now on a one-of-a-kind experience that may yet kindle a musical career.

Princeton’s Ben Taub (left, with fellow competitor Mycle Wastman), competes on the “Battle Rounds” episode of The Voice that aired Oct. 16, 2012. (Photo by Tyler Golden/NBC.)

With no formal voice training, Taub auditioned for the show because he thought it would be fun. In the end, he found he learned a lot about himself.

“During the course of the show, I learned that I was far more serious about singing than I thought,” he says. “I wanted to dive into the music that I really care about — a cross between jazz and soul.”

In early October, he began his first ever voice lessons. A philosophy major at Princeton University, Taub decided to take a leave of absence rather than to finish his senior year in 2013, in order to investigate distractions from his academic major.

Speaking by cell phone as he rode to Pittsburgh as a passenger, Taub described his journey as a contestant on The Voice, a show in which four established pop music stars coach teams of singers in the hope of helping them win the competition.

The show is a TV ratings leader. For 2011 and the beginnings of the 2012 season, The Voice drew the largest number of viewers in the 18-49 age group. Taub was one of the roughly 100,000 aspirants who auditioned for the show. He was among the 45,000 who chose the live auditions; the other 55,000 auditioned by submitting a video.

“The nice thing about the in-person audition is that you know what’s going on immediately,” he said. “You sing for few seconds in front of a live audience. Nine out of 10 of the singers are told, ‘Thank you for coming.’”

One out of 10 is called back to perform before three or four panelists. Those contestants prepare three songs, then the music and an interview are taped and judged by executive producers in Los Angeles.

From the 10,000 hopefuls who are called back, just 250 are chosen to appear in front of the executive producers of the show. That happened in May, during Taub’s final exams. “My math teacher allowed me to do my final exam by Skype from my hotel room in L. A,” he said.

The executive producers select150 contestants from the group of 250 to appear on television in a blind audition, which is the first phase to be shown on television. There, the field of 150 is reduced to 64 as the judge-coaches — Christina Aguilera, Adam Levine, Cee Lo Green and Blake Shelton — each select a team of 16 singers.

The coaches sit in high-back chairs facing away from the contestants. Neither competitors nor coaches can see each other. The coaches’ decisions are based solely on the quality of the voices.

“When the coaches want you, they press a button, the chair spins around, and then you see their face,” Taub said. “You decide which coach you will work with if more than one coach chooses you.”

Taub’s blind audition aired Sept. 18. Both Green and Shelton chose him.

“I always have been a fan of Cee Lo,” Taub said. “If all four had turned around, I would have chosen him.”

The second televised phase is the battle round, where members of each team compete against fellow team-members. The competing pairs sing the same songs at the same time, and their coach chooses one to continue in the competition.

Taub’s battle round was televised on Oct. 16. In it, he faced off with Mycle Wastman. At the end, Wastman was the one chosen to advance, and Taub was eliminated. He was one of 64 out of 100,000 to have lasted as long as he did.

The battle round was taped in August, but as a contestant, Taub was not permitted to talk about it until it aired. He said Cee Lo Green, pleased with his chosen team of 16, took the group to Las Vegas to tape a Christmas show.

“He wants to keep the team together,” Taub says.

Ever resilient, Taub was driving to Pittsburgh for a recording session the day after the airing of his last episode. His friend and colleague, a bass player, was at the steering wheel. The two will record new music with a jazz combo.

“We’re not improvising the entire thing,” Taub says. “It’s slightly more scripted. We’re going to be writing the music in the next three days, and we’ll record it the day after. We have a rough idea of what we’ll write. We’ve worked together before.”

During the next few months, Taub also plans to work with a music producer who was a visiting professor at Princeton last semester. The two expect to write, produce and record music.

Besides singing, Taub is attracted by journalism. He expects to return to Princeton and graduate with the class of 2014.

In the course of his leave of absence from Princeton Taub expects to explore a career in journalism seriously by returning to Morocco, where he spent time earlier in 2012.

He worked for a nongovernmental agency in Rabat, the capital, writing articles on a free-lance basis. His articles appeared in September in LatitudeNews, a web publication, and in Nassau Weekly, a print publication run by Princeton students.

As a student at Princeton High School, Taub played oboe in the orchestra. He said he did classical music until he started singing when he was 14 or 15.

Asked about the connection between oboe and singing, he said, “The oboe takes melodic lines. Both oboe and singing require breath control. Oboe gave me an understanding of musical phrasing, which influenced my singing.”

His formal piano lessons stopped when he was eight. “I play well enough to accompany my singing,” he said.

Taub was brought up with classical music. He is the son of pianist Robert Taub, the first Artist in Residence at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, expert on Beethoven, and an advocate of new music. Currently, Robert is devoting himself to his software enterprise, “MuseAmi,” which can be tracked down online.

“I had the privilege of hearing my father practice while I was growing up,” son Ben said. “Partly my music is genetic. My father has perfect pitch, and so do I.”

Asked about his reaction to Ben’s musical goals, which lie outside the classical canon, father Robert said in a telephone conversation, “We support all of our kids fully in their career aspirations. Ben is a very musical young man. He is a thoughtful person who gives full consideration to any decision he makes. He has the capability to evaluate, adjust and adapt to any situation he faces.”

The third and final televised phase of The Voice airs in November. Eventually, television viewers will vote for a single winner. The show is based on a Dutch reality-based television show called The Voice of Holland. It aired in the United States for the first time in April 2011.

To see videos and photos of Ben Taub participating in the show, go online to nbc.com/the-voice.