Brazil's Brightest Jewels.

IN 1939, ON THE EVE of World War II, a penniless German Jew named Hans Stern arrived in Brazil with his parents, and with no clue as to how he'd make a living. Six years later, as the war was winding down, the enterprising refugee inaugurated a jewelry business with $200 in savings.

Today, H. Stern Comercio e Industria S.A. is Latin America's leading jewelry conglomerate, with 180 stores in luxury hotels, shopping malls, and airports from Belo Horizonte to Bogota. Hardly a five-star property opens in some Latin American capital, it seems, without the obligatory H. Stern outlet and its glittering display of watches, necklaces, rings, and bracelets in the hotel lobby.

It's been a long road from Essen to Ipanema, the upscale Rio de Janeiro suburb where Stern's showroom is visited by thousands of tourists a month. Many of them would undoubtedly be surprised to learn how, over the course of a half-century, Stern became one of Brazil's most successful businessmen.

"First I worked as a broker, going to the hinterlands, getting stones on consignment," Stern says. "I ended up making some jewelry for friends, then customers. At that time, the export business was all in the hands of non-Jewish Poles. This is when I learned my only sentence in Polish, which translates as 'we don't need any calibrated aquamarines.'"

The young jeweler's big break came in 1951, when he received an order from Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza for a $20,000 aquamarine necklace. The business continued growing, and in 1956, Rio de Janeiro's fathers granted him the title of "honorary citizen."

Over the years, H. Stern has introduced efficient and permanent research for raw materials, utilizing items of various origins and a variety of precious metals, from gold to platinum. The most popular Brazilian gemstone is the aquamarine, which is mined in the state of Minas Gerais, Espirito Santo, and Bahia. Emeralds, meanwhile, are found in the states of Goias and Bahia, while the rare imperial topaz is produced at only one mine in the world, near the colonial city of Ouro Preto. And although the country produces only 3 to 5 percent of the world's diamonds, the superior beauty and hardness of Brazilian diamonds places them among the world's most desired gemstones.

Currently, H. Stern employs thirty-five hundred people--about twenty-eight hundred in Brazil--in the business of producing jewelry from gold, diamonds, and a dazzling array of local gemstones ranging from aquamarine and amethyst to tourmaline, topaz, and tanzanite.

Accounting for a 65 percent share of Brazil's gemstone industry, H. Stern also has outlets in every major Latin American city and in numerous Caribbean ports of call as well as Europe and Israel.

A tour of the H. Stern museum and cutting and polishing factory in Ipanema is almost an obligatory ritual on the itinerary of every Visitor to Rio. In fact, some ten thousand tourists drop by the seventeen-story headquarters every month. On the third floor of the Ipanema headquarters, visitors may take a forty-step gemological tour, showing how a jewel is made, begriming with cutting the rough stone, designing, goldsmith work, selection, and polishing. The H. Stern Cultural Center, also on the building's third floor, holds a permanent exhibition of unusual specimens of rough crystals and precious stones, including the world's largest collection of tourmalines-with more than a thousand stones in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes.

"I believe that Brazil, being so rich in gems, should be known to the world for gemstones," says Stern, "as France is for perfumes, as Scotland is for whiskey."