On a typical flight from Denver to St. Louis, passengers barely have enough time to digest the Wall Street Journal or finish perusing the latest copy of Vanity Fair.

Add the excited chatter of 61 Colorado youths traveling to NFTY’s regional winter chavurah, and time itself accelerates out of existence.

But on Jan. 15, NFTYites from Temples Sinai and Emanuel put aside frivolity to focus on victims of the catastrophic earthquake that leveled Haiti a mere three days earlier.

By the time they landed in St. Louis, they had raised hundreds of dollars for Haitian relief — from every passenger on that plane.

Jennifer Shidler of Greenwood Village was recently named the grand prize winner of the New York-based Center for Kosher Culinary Arts’ (CKCA) winter scholarship contest.

Shidler, who was able to use her scholarship to begin the winter professional program in baking and pastry arts, is a summer, 2009,  graduate of CKCA’s professional program in culinary arts.

She is a 2003 graduate Herzl-RMHA and the daughter of Michael and Ann Shidler.

Shidler plans a career in the pastry arts, and is already hard at work at CKCA in Flatbush, Brooklyn, learning the techniques and strategies necessary to develop her own recipes as a pastry chef.