DAVID ROSENBERG
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT, ROSENBERG DIAMONDS & CO.

David Rosenberg is one of a small number of American diamantaires operating at the highest level of the international market. Since establishing the House in 2000, he has built a private Boca Raton boutique serving collectors, family offices, royalty and heads of state, working exclusively in important natural diamonds and the rarest fancy colors in the world. His mantra, A Legacy in Every Carat, reflects a conviction that a stone's value lies in what it carries forward rather than what it costs.

His expertise spans the entire trade, from sourcing rough to cutting, manufacturing and design. A former member of the Argyle Pink Select Atelier, one of a limited group worldwide granted access to the world's rarest pink diamonds, he became in 2007 the youngest person ever elected President of the Diamond Dealers Club of Southeast USA. Known in the trade as The Ice Man, he is regularly sought for expertise on Type IIa and D Flawless stones and on the fancy color market. In 2022 he acquired the Williamson Pink Star, an 11.15 carat Fancy Vivid Pink Internally Flawless diamond, at a world record price per carat for any diamond ever sold at auction.

David is a member of the Diamond Manufacturers & Importers Association of America and the World Diamond Council and has served on the boards of the Natural Color Diamond Association and the World Federation of Diamond Bourses.

A longstanding and largely private supporter of causes across South Florida, David lives in Boca Raton with his wife, Jamie, and their son Jonathan, who has joined him in the family business. This year he serves as Title Sponsor of Boca's Ballroom Battle and competes as one of the 2026 Community Dancers, with a goal of raising one million dollars for the Fund's scholars.

WHY I SAID YES TO DANCING

I was sixteen when my family flew home without me.

It was supposed to be a family vacation. All six of us came, my parents and my two younger brothers and my sister. I am the oldest. One day before the flight back to Israel, my parents made the decision to leave me in New York with my aunt. One day. I was in high school in Tel Aviv with a group of friends I had grown up with and a girlfriend I had no idea I was saying goodbye to. There was no goodbye. There was a vacation, and then there was a country I lived in alone. I should mention that my English at that point consisted of yes, no, and a handful of words I was using incorrectly. Sixteen years old in America, unable to hold a conversation. Looking back it is almost funny. It was not funny then. I stayed with my aunt in New York, and within a week I was sent to her husband in Santa Monica, where I lived about four months. By then my six-month tourist visa was running out. I had to change my status, and to do that I had to enroll in school, and to enroll in school a sixteen-year-old needs a legal guardian. So I moved again, to Fort Lauderdale, where my uncle owned restaurants and became my guardian. My family immigrated a year later. Three states, three households, one year, sixteen years old, barely speaking the language, and a clock running on my right to stay. I was doing the paperwork myself.

My father Arik was a businessman. My mother Sylvie was an esthetician, a licensed trade she worked with her hands. I want to be honest about what that did and did not mean. My parents had a hard time of it financially for years. My father could not support me with money. What he gave me instead was honesty, integrity, and permission to dream far bigger than our circumstances justified. He was my best friend. I lost him at fifty-three. I lost my mother at sixty-two. So when I reached college in the early 1990s, there was nothing behind me. I was on a student visa, which meant two things at once. I paid triple tuition as an international student, and I was required to remain enrolled full time to keep my status. There was no version of that arithmetic that worked. No aid, no loans, no family safety net large enough to close the gap. I worked multiple jobs in restaurants, and I still could not carry it. I dropped out because I could not afford to stay. Nobody was coming. That is the part I remember most clearly. Not the hours, not the exhaustion. The absence of anyone whose job it was to notice.

I did not enter the diamond trade until the late 1990s. I came in through the front door, selling, opening accounts with the major retailers one at a time. Only later did I move back through the trade to the rough and the polished, where the real education is. Everything since has been one thing: looking at a stone nobody else would look at twice, seeing what is inside it, and committing the years required to bring it out. Value is not purchased. It is revealed, by someone willing to stay with it long enough. Which is why I know exactly what the George Snow Scholarship Fund is. It is not a check. A check would have helped me and it would not have been enough. What I needed at nineteen was someone whose job it was to notice. The Fund walks beside each scholar for the entire journey, guides them through the parts nobody warns you about, and does not let go until the degree is in their hand. Most of these students are the first in their families to attempt this. They are doing what I could not do, and only because somebody decided in advance that they would not be left to figure it out alone.

Every one of these scholars is a rough stone. The only question is whether anyone commits to them.

For fifteen years this Fund invited me to compete in Boca's Ballroom Battle, and for fifteen years I said no. Discretion is the foundation of my trade, and I have never taken a dance lesson in my life. Nine hundred people watching me learn was not an appealing proposition.

This year I said yes. Then I took the title sponsorship of the entire evening, the highest position available, before I asked a single person for a dollar. I do not ask anyone to do what I have not already done myself. My goal is one million dollars, a figure no dancer has approached in nineteen years.

I never finished my degree, and I am grateful for my life and everything I have been able to build. But I have thought about it for thirty years, and it was never really about the money. It was that there was no one whose job it was to ask how I was doing, or whether I was going to make it, or what I needed. Nobody was coming, so I went on alone, and I made it, and I would not wish the loneliness of it on anyone. Somewhere in this county tonight there is a nineteen-year-old doing the same arithmetic in a kitchen after a double shift and getting the same answer I got. I cannot go back and be there for the boy I was. I can be there for them.

That is what your gift buys. Not tuition. Somebody there. I will do the dancing. I am asking you for the rest.