When you meet the Dalumi Group team you meet elegance that is associated with love, marriage, the thought of the other, fashion jewelry and even extravagance.
Dalumi Group, a De Beers Group senior site holder, is in the business of loose gem-stone diamonds and innovative finished jewelry products with diamond cutting factories in Namibia and Botswana and offices in Israel, Japan, China, Hong-Kong, Antwerpen, Belgium, and New York and Los Angeles.
One Jewish family story repeated many thousand times
Subsequent to the state of Israel gaining its independence in 1948, and the Arab states – contingents of four of the seven countries of the Arab League at that time, namely Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, and Syria, supported by the Arab Liberation Army and corps of volunteers from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Yemen – launching an aggressive war against the nascent Jewish state, approximately 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and North Africa Moslem countries, where they could claim hundreds of years of history and national belonging.
One such family was the Dalumi family who arrived in Israel from Iraq in 1951, three years after the state declared its independence.
The parents of Meir Dalumi, the current Managing Director of the Dalumi Group whom I met in Los Angeles, both Iraqi Jews, were young when they landed in Israel; his mother was two-years-old and father, Asher, was 13-years-old.
“In Iraq, my father Asher’s father, my grandfather, was in the construction business and his wife, my grandmother, was a stay-home mom,” Meir touched on his family history.
Life in Israel was a long term adjustment process and much hardship for the Jewish immigrants who arrived in Israel. They came from all over the world after WWII and after Israel declared its independence. At that time Israel was an economic basket case but the newly arrived Jews possessed much hope and enthusiasm.
“When my father was 15-years-old he had to go to work,” Meir told me. “He found work in a diamond’s polishing plant, in Netanya, in those days the center of Israel’s diamond industry.” There Asher Dalumi learned all the aspects of the diamond polishing craft while also attending high school. Asher left work to serve in the Israeli military and immediately upon ending his service he returned to work at the diamond polishing plant and slowly advanced in his work position.
Asher Dalumi gathered a group of diamond polishers who worked with him and opened a diamond cutting factory. Eventually, in 1960, he established the Dalumi Company. In the ’90s, Meir Dalumi along with his siblings, the Dalumi family’s second generation, joined their father’s business.
The Dalumi Group, a leading player in the global diamond and jewelry industry, has earned a reputation as one of the diamond world’s most trusted names in this business.
With manufacturing facilities in Botswana, Namibia, Israel and India, offices around the globe and some 550 professional employees worldwide, the Dalumi Company is the recipient of Israel’s “Outstanding Exporter” award, for the years 1995 and 2008.
The yellow diamond fashion
To be successful in business one has to find a business niche that causes success. Diamonds are categorized by size, color and purity. The color is graded by the English language letters, starting with the letter ‘D’ for the highest color grade, an absolutely colorless and extremely rare diamond and ending with ‘K-to-Z’ letters a noticeable-yellow tinge color diamonds.
When the diamonds’ prices were more reasonable the colorless stones were in vogue. Nowadays, the fashion is with the noticeable-yellow tinge color diamonds.
During the past 20 years the Dalumi Group has developed a specialization in manufacturing and selling of the entire spectrum of the best brilliant yellow diamonds. In their Golden Diamonds Collection, inspirational concepts and designs and state-of-the-art communication materials, all of which are the result of quality manufacturing and attention to the tiniest details, each piece is tailor-made, based on the unique features of the selected centre diamond. “Just like no two customers are similar, no two items in the Golden Collection are alike,” they claim, making each one-of-a-kind piece the proud possession of Dalumi’s discerning clients.
The Dalumi Group corporate social responsibility
The Dalumi Group is committed to promote ethical and responsible business practices in all the communities in which it operates.
In Gaborone, Botswana, Dalumi sponsors the Tlokweng SOS Children’s Village, an initiative that provides a home to 245 children, whereby Dalumi assists by subsidizing food, clothing, medication and school materials.
The long term goal ahead of the Dalumi group is to bring Israel’s quality diamonds closer to the international consumer. From polished diamonds, in various colors and qualities, to innovative, beautifully designed branded jewelry collections, Dalumi offers clients a range of turnkey jewelry solutions as well as education.
Susan Greenwood (tel./office: 213-612-0822 / mobile: 206-334-0912) is the Dalumi Group fine jewelry division sales & marketing director. In her personal service capacity Susan helps the customer to design the ring, incorporating selecting the diamonds and the fitting design.
Israel, a stand up nation
You may ask why I tell this story that somewhat reads like a commercial.
Well, no. The Dalumi family’s success is just one success story of the overall success story of the state of Israel. It took the Jews who were forced to immigrate to build Israel and fought her wars to make the Jewish state a start-up and a stand up nation.