Brian Harrod: NOTABLE JEWISH JOURNALISTS: If You Thought Yonkers Tribune Publisher Hezi Aris, Was The Oldest "Acid Tongued Blogger" In Yonkers At Age 71, Then You Would Be Wrong Because 80 Year Old Diana Wiener Is Taking Names And Kicking Butts In The City Of Hills....

 

NOTABLE JEWISH JOURNALISTS: If You Thought Yonkers Tribune Publisher Hezi Aris, Was The Oldest "Acid Tongued Blogger" In Yonkers At Age 71, Then You Would Be Wrong Because 80 Year Old Diana Wiener Is Taking Names And Kicking Butts In The City Of Hills.... NEW YORK TIMES: At 80, She Is the Defiant Editor of ‘The Buzz’ KEEPING MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTABLE: Many retirement communities have declined to name names during the pandemic. So she started a newsletter to do just that. YONKERS: Diana Wiener, the editor of The Buzz, a newsletter she distributes among her retirement community. Diana Wiener wanted information and was not getting it. So last May, at age 80, Ms. Wiener went into the news business. “I’d had it with this whole secrecy thing,” she said the other day. Ms. Wiener, a former furniture store owner, lives with her husband in the Five Star Premier Residences of Yonkers just north of New York City, a retirement community that provides multiple levels of care. When the novel coronavirus hit New York last spring, and the building management confined residents to their apartments, Ms. Wiener felt a frustration that has become common among those who live in buildings like hers. Residents had no idea which neighbors or employees were sick with the virus, which had died, which had moved out or been exposed during a visit to the doctor. Management refused to provide names, citing privacy laws. For Ms. Wiener, this lack of information was dangerous. “Every time we went to the doctor, they would ask you, have you been in contact with anyone?” she said. “How do I know? They’re not telling us anything. If we don’t know, how can we say we haven’t been in contact?” Ms. Wiener, who once served on the town council in Port Jervis, N.Y., is by her own description a “big-mouthed Jewish girl from Brooklyn.” So instead of just complaining to neighbors about the lack of information, she decided to do something about it. When she told the building’s executive director, John Hunt, that she intended to write a newsletter for residents, he wrote back, “They cannot understand what is happening.” “That really infuriated me,” she said. “I just felt it was dismissing us as little babies — go to your room and be quiet. I decided that I was going to do this and I did it. Somebody has to stand up.” Mr. Hunt declined to comment for this article, referring questions to Five Star’s corporate office, which said in a statement that the company “established a comprehensive communications protocol that ensured team members, residents and their families would be informed of necessary developments regarding Covid-19 in as close to real time as possible,” while adhering to privacy laws. Ms. Wiener, who had no journalism experience, recruited a friend to proofread and found a local printer who would make 170 glossy copies. That was all she needed. In May, she and a couple of neighbors slipped the debut issue of The Buzz, 12 pages, under the doors of Five Star’s 146 independent living apartments. “We distributed them kind of surreptitiously,” said Eve Boden, 86, a retired psychotherapist. “It was making management be accountable and inform us what was happening. Because basically they said, Please stay in your apartment. We will bring meals to you. And that was the end of that. So Diana said, We’re going to do this, and I said, Yay, right on. She’s a moving force.” At the top of the first page Ms. Wiener wrote, “Isn’t it time for a newsletter by us, for us?” The first issue included some news: contrary to the building’s official daily emails, which did not mention deaths in the building, 13 people at Five Star had died of the coronavirus since March. Ms. Wiener wrote: “We are not children, to be confined to our rooms, to have the names of those who are sick, or have died, withheld from us. This is our community. These are our neighbors, our people. Our family.” The next issue added the names of the dead and hospitalized. Sean Strub, a friend of Ms. Wiener’s, said he was not surprised to see her stirring up trouble. Mr. Strub, 62, an AIDS activist and founder of POZ magazine, is now a hotelier and mayor of rural Milford, Pa. He said he would welcome Ms. Wiener in his foxhole anytime. “Smart, persistent and really wonderful,” he wrote by email. “She’s also outspoken, and some people may find her abrasive. She doesn’t tolerate fools well, but she’s afraid of no one.” Ms. Wiener, for her part, said she wished she could adopt Mr. Strub. In addition to news of the death toll at Five Star, Ms. Wiener added poems and book reviews by other residents, as well as updates on the virus from state and federal health bulletins. Neighbors began slipping envelopes of cash under her door to cover printing expenses — $500 from one supporter, $5 from another. For a while, hardly a day went by without another contribution. Ms. Wiener cultivated sources among the building’s workers, who started to tell her things that management would not. For the residents, the newsletter struck a chord..... https://www.facebook.com/groups/YonkersNewswire/permalink/2872666336324259/