Ben-Amun began with a New York City love story.

A young Egyptian immigrant met a Polish young lady on the day she immigrated to America with her family. Isaac and Regina Manevitz eventually married and attended Brooklyn College together before launching their fashion jewelry business in 1980. They chose the name Ben-Amun, combining the name of their first son and Tutankhamun, the famous Egyptian king.

Isaac Manevitz is Ben-Amun’s designer. His father was a jeweler in Egypt, and Isaac was always designing.

As for Regina Manevitz, she calls herself the “sidekick”. While she was working on a PhD at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, she would come to help out with the business, and then ended up staying. Isaac designs every Ben-Amun piece with a bold, distinctive style. He loves jewelry and is very picky about quality. Originally a fine jewelry designer, he treats every fashion jewel in the same way he would treat a real jewel. Ben-Amun pieces reflect the earliest days of costume jewelry – known in the 1950s and 60s as “travel jewelry” – meant to look and feel like fine jewels.

As a young company in the 1980s, Ben-Amun attracted a lot of attention, with features of Isaac Manevitz in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue.

Over the years, the company grew to a team of more than 25 skilled artisans. The handcrafted pieces feature the highest quality of materials such as 24K gold, Majorca pearls, and Czech glass stones. The success of the company is linked to its deep knowledge of design and jewelry. The company survived the pandemic because Isaac can make each piece from start to finish: when no one could make it to work due to Covid, he continued producing, flawlessly doing the work of twenty people!