Ronn Torossian is an American born serial entrepreneur and best-selling author who has lectured at Harvard Business School. In 1997, after years of serving as the National President of the Betar Zionist Youth Movement he made aliya. While living in Israel, he co-founded with Likud MK Danny Danon, Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.N, Our Jerusalem, which actively worked to promote the right of Jews to live in all areas of Jerusalem.
When Torossian returned to the U.S. he founded 5WPR, which today is one of America’s leading privately held PR agencies with over 300 employees. He also founded the How Agency, a leading digital communications company.
Since 2022, Torossian has lived between New York City and Tel Aviv with homes in both cities. As a philanthropist he’s an active board member of numerous organizations, including serving as President of American Friends of Duvdevan, an IDF elite unit, a board member of Shirat Hadin Israel Law Center and others. Torossian is 49, single and a proud father of two daughters.
Since October 7th, he has worked tirelessly with hundreds of organizations, agencies and civilians, both in Israel and in the US on public relations and communal efforts for Israel and the Jewish people.
You have been heavily involved in Jewish & Israeli PR since October 7th what are some memorable moments?
In crisis PR situations move rapidly and require quick decision making, this has never been so real as since October 7th. Yet, now we realize how public relations is so much less important than the survival of our people, than the lives of our hostages and soldiers - yet PR helps with these issues so much.
From Day One it was so important the message be framed as its us or them. A battle between good and evil. ISIS type barbarians who committed unthinkable atrocities against women, children, men and the elderly.
I stood right after the October 7th massacre at the United Nations with my friend Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan where he described Hamas as Nazis, sobering and accurate language necessary for the world to hear. At this event, where Israel’s leading singer, Noa Kirel sang Hatikvah I remember telling this young woman representing our nation to remember this moment as 100 years from now these scenes will commemorate the mass murder of our people. The power of PR.
For the first few weeks of the war, like many others, I just couldn’t and didn’t sleep. Created dozens of WhatsApp groups connecting people with needs. Emergency flights, frontline needs, all in between watching nightmare Telegram videos. Thousands of reporters from all over the world were looking for answers. Talking points and creative materials and documents were created and disseminated, and in those first few weeks I arranged over 1500 interviews for hostage families, relatives of the victims, politicians, hospitals and more. A media center, a bridge during times of chaos. It continues now with the International Court of Justice hearings, protests which need attention, solidarity visits, injured soldiers, visits of influencers and celebrities, all things which shift the media attention and narrative during this historic time and require intense focus.
Living between the US and Israel, Jewish communities in both are under such stress, such historic times. How did you decide where to focus?
It’s constant. I try to help. I was sitting in an important meeting with a well-known journalist and a few blocks away got a call that at that moment Jewish students were locked in the library at Cooper Union. I ran there immediately, and arrived just as the students exited the library. I mobilized politicians and media outlets, arranging lawyers to express outrage at the treatment of Jewish students. I arranged for elected officials to host a press conference there outside the library the next day. So much has happened at universities where responses are needed, and politicians or lawyers or organizations are needed to speak up for the interest of Jews and their defense.
Media is so powerful, and it all moves so fast.
I visited Kibbutz Beeri in November with my long-time friend Noam Lanir, a leading entrepreneur doing remarkable philanthropic work throughout Israel
and got a call from my daughter a freshman at a major University in the Northeast with protests at her class building calling to Free Palestine. Letters were needed, media responses. This is the reality we live in. Living between a place where our people cry in the streets for missing families and where posters are ripped down, we put up daily in Manhattan in the course of hours.
We have brought Rami Davidian the hero of the Nova festival who saved 750 people to the U.S. to share his story. He is an unsung hero I have spent time with both in Israel and in the U.S. who like so many other heroes have a story which must be told for generations. And as I have learned through friends like Rami and fighters in Duvdevan and other units our people have so many needs, from PTSD to financial realities to so much more.
I am quite active with the families of the hostages, securing media worldwide for many families members. I have hosted and spent time with the relatives of hostages, Ella Ben Ami, Yair Moses and others and their families both in the U.S. and Israel helping to share the horror stories of our people with the world. Coordinating media in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square, it’s often a horror to hear the journalist questions of our people. The world’s media has done thousands of interviews we have arranged and it’s still not enough. We need our people home now.
I have also received a stream of requests of all kinds, from assisting with all sorts of technical and financial needs on the battlefield, to communications assistance for governmental, non-profit, communal, and political leaders all across the spectrum both in Israel and America.
What’s next?
Living in both NYC and Tel Aviv offers the reality of living in the Jewish state even during these times of craziness. Love living in Tel Aviv, walking in Neve Tzedek, time with friends in Ramat Hasharon, evenings on the beach. Lifelong friends in Israel who are like family always present.
Yet its a long war on so many fronts.
As an Israeli I am confident in the future as together we will win this war. As an American Jew, I am unsure if or how we will be safe in the United States. History has always told us “Next Year in Jerusalem,” and the Diaspora today is scary. Every Jew in America needs to think of a Plan B.
Israel will see a golden age after the war in innovation, real estate, business, and in investments. I am an active investor in Israeli tech companies, even more so after October 7th. Diaspora Jews, including Americans will flock to Israel and I predict record aliya in years to come. I imagine an Israel which is rebuilt, much as Jews from the former USSR in the 1990’s and Europe more recently helped this country, so too will Israel benefit as the only place in the world safe for Jews.
As the popular song by the Israeli pop artist Jasmin Moallem says, “In the end, it will be good, even from within the darkness, the light will ignite.”
This article was written in cooperation with Ronn Torossian