How my dad, Steve Witkoff, turned pain into – Latest News
My father, Steve Witkoff, has all the time been a man of compassion. His life has been constructed on a easy creed: When people endure, you don’t look away — you step ahead and help.
He didn’t come from privilege. His father was a coat producer, and at 29, with no financial security web, he took the leap to start out his own business.
Hard work was his inheritance; perseverance his language. Even as he constructed a profession from nothing, he by no means allowed success to eclipse his humanity or his devotion to household.
Between 2009 and 2011, our household confronted the best trial conceivable: My older brother, Andrew, was battling dependancy — a illness that consumed his spirit however by no means his mild.
My mother and father surrounded him with fixed care, however a lapse in security at his remedy heart allowed him to go away unattended.
On Aug. 14, 2011, Andrew handed away unexpectedly from an overdose at simply 22.
That second shattered us. Yet from the depths of that grief, my father emerged with a renewed function: to make sure no different household would endure alone.
For him, philanthropy has by no means been solely about writing checks. It can be about exhibiting up — personally, immediately and with out fanfare.
He would learn tales of mother and father who had misplaced youngsters and drive to their properties in The Bronx or Queens, unannounced, merely to offer consolation.
One of these quiet encounters was with Lasharn Harvey, a homeless lady who sat exterior our workplace in New York.
Beyond financial assist, she turned half of our household — a visitor at Thanksgiving, and a pal my father guided via remedy when she was identified with a devastating mind tumor.
These weren’t grand gestures. They had been acts of love.
During these darkish years, one one who regularly stood by our household was Donald J. Trump. Away from cameras and politics, he known as consistently — to not focus on business or headlines, however to ask how we had been holding up.
His compassion meant the world to us. When he later turned president, he and the primary woman made the opioid epidemic a national precedence and invited my father to share Andrew’s story on the White House Opioids Summit in 2018.
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It was a second when non-public pain turned public function — when a father’s grief discovered that means in service to others.
Those experiences turned my father’s ethical compass — the lens via which he now views each act of service.
When President Trump later appointed him particular envoy for peace missions, my father carried that lesson with him: Empathy and energy aren’t opposites however companions.
He usually says that, with out President Trump’s instance and perception, he may by no means have entered public service in any respect.
My father has long known as Donald Trump the best president in our nation’s historical past for his imaginative and prescient and management — however what has all the time stood out most to him is the personal compassion President Trump confirmed our household long earlier than politics ever entered the image.
Over the previous yr, my father has traveled the world — usually at his own expense — advancing President Trump’s mission of peace and the return of hostages, together with Americans Marc Fogel, Edan Alexander and dozens more.
What struck me most was how personally he embraced that calling.
Beyond conferences and briefings, he spent numerous hours with hostage households — sitting beside them, listening to their tales and restoring religion when hope appeared misplaced.
Whether it was Noa Argamani, Eli Sharabi or Ilay David, these households turned like our own. He prayed with them, cried with them and reminded them that they weren’t forgotten.
Through all of it, my father has mentioned that his service shouldn’t be a job — it’s a calling.
To him, peace shouldn’t be negotiated solely in convention rooms; it’s constructed within the quiet moments of shared humanity, when people select compassion over indifference.
Every time he comforts a grieving dad or mum or reunites a hostage with family members, he carries Andrew’s reminiscence and President Trump’s directive with him.
Out of tragedy, he discovered function — to heal what’s damaged, to consolation these in pain and to show that love, even after loss, can nonetheless change the world.
Alex Witkoff is the CEO of The Witkoff Group and serves on the board of the US Holocaust Museum.
