Private

Deep in the bowels of a Prospect Heights apartment building that looks just like any other in this trendy neighborhood, down a long, winding hallway flanked on either side with burnished doors, 30 young children spend their days learning how to learn.

The cost of a four-year private college education has passed the $150,000 mark — which is “enough to cause even the most affluent parent to want to sit down and cry,” according to Kalman Chany, author of the 2009 edition of the Princeton Review’s “Paying For College Without Going Broke.” And in 2009, the average one year tuition cost (including room and board, books, and other fees) will be $35,958 — up 5.5 percent from the previous year.

For Nathan Rubinstein, a traditional bar mitzvah seemed improbable, if not impossible. Born with an optic glioma — a severe type of eye cancer —– Nathan endured nearly five years of chemotherapy beginning when he was 3. The treatment left him entirely sightless in his left eye and with only marginal vision in his right.

In the early 1990s, two oncologists — troubled by how frustrated and confused their newly-diagnosed breast cancer patients felt — decided to comprehensively address their lists of unanswered questions. The doctors teamed up to publish the first edition of a guidebook to breast cancer in 1992.

She may not have a lot, but 80-something-year-old Helen Stechler insists upon serving chilled Poland Spring water and a bowl of bright orange cantaloupe to her impromptu guests, as they enter her brand new studio apartment in Manhattan ’s Upper West Side.

Stechler, who escaped the Nazi death marches in her teenage years, is now able to live comfortably among friends and even enjoys a special bond with Maryanne Pasquariello, her housing director.

Eleven-year-old Benjamin Sternklar Davis felt far away from the safety of his Upper West Side home as he walked through the debris-strewn streets of Sderot, in southern Israel. Visiting homes that had been devastated by rocket fire, Benjamin and his mother Sarah wandered through rubble riddled with household items — half-completed math homework, a shredded teddy bear, a frying pan.