In 2012, self-proclaimed “Olympics freak” Greg Rosenbaum received a call from Katie Ledecky’s uncle, John Ledecky, asking him for tickets to see the then 15-year-old swimmer compete in the 800-meter freestyle in London.
Rosenbaum was skeptical at first.
“Why are you so confident that your niece will make the final?”
Rosenbaum ended up buying the tickets for the Ledeckys, a choice he doesn’t regret. Now, Rosenbaum is friends with the Ledecky family. A former board member of the United States Olympics & Paralympic Foundation, he has attended seven Olympics, including the recently completed Paris Olympics.
Rosenbaum, a businessman and investor, is president and founder of Palisades Associates, a merchant banking firm. From 2003-’12, he was the chairman of the largest producer of kosher poultry in the U.S., Empire Kosher Poultry.
In 2013, President Barack Obama appointed Rosenbaum to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, where he served for nearly four years. He lives in Bethesda with his wife and belongs to Temple Beth Ami in Rockville.
Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I was brought up Jewish in Toledo, [Ohio]. My family belonged to a Conservative synagogue there, and we were very active in the shul. I went to Sunday school all the way through graduation. I was bar mitzvahed, I was confirmed; I was even invited to give a guest sermon at the Sunday school graduation ceremonies, which was a thrill for me to get up and look out from the bimah and talk about issues of concern for me in Jewish life, and that has led to some pretty deep involvement as an adult in the community.
Tell me about your humanitarian work. Why was your work with Empire Kosher Poultry important?
My business has been doing turnarounds, which [means] buying companies that are in distress and trying to fix them. I [looked] at a portfolio of companies where the banks were looking to shed the loans that they had made to them because they thought the companies weren’t going to perform on those loans. One of the companies was Empire Kosher Poultry, and I thought to myself, ‘How is this possible?’ This is a company that makes a product that people are commanded by God to buy. The more I looked into the business, the more convinced I was that we should take control of this company and fix it. It became a labor of love — everywhere I went, people would say to me how dependent they were upon Empire Kosher Poultry to make up a substantial portion of their diet. It became a mission to me that I couldn’t let this company fail because I’d be letting down such a substantial portion of the American Jewish community.
It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor. If you kept kosher, you needed access to kosher food. So we started distribution programs to various camps and food banks. We donated poultry and we made major donations to the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty in New York, which was where the largest concentrated need for the product was and, in 2011, I was awarded the Humanitarian of the Year Award by the MCJP. Empire became a central focus of my life for a decade.
You’re a self-proclaimed “Olympics freak.” Tell me more about that.
This was my seventh Olympics, which doesn’t qualify me for super-stardom because I have friends who have been to 17 [or] 22, but seven is a lot, and I’ve come to really enjoy the Olympic experience. Over the years, I’ve learned how to maximize the Olympic experience … We approach it from the standpoint of ‘We’re not going to Paris to sightsee or sample the food. We’re going to Paris to see the Olympics,’ so we planned a program which had us see 31 events in 15 different sports in the equivalent of 11 days. We averaged almost three events a day and focused on medal events … of the 31 events that we attended, medals were handed out at 29 of them.
How did this interest start out?
The first Olympics I attended was 1984 in Los Angeles, and the firm I worked with at the time was a corporate partner with the LA organizing committee, and we figured that we would use the tickets that came with that partnership to take customers and executives of our portfolio companies to the Olympics. My boss went around and asked everybody [if] they wanted to go to the Olympics. Did they want to take clients to the Olympics? And everybody declined … so I said, ‘I’ll do this.’ I got the first ticket, and I took clients and some of our partners to various events around Los Angeles and had a ball.
Have you always been interested in sports?
I was interested in sports from a very young age. I will say that I was never very good at any of it, but I did everything you can do as a kid growing up: I played football, baseball, basketball — I played at the JCC — and I was a swimmer and a diver … I wasn’t great as an athlete, but I had this intense interest in sports.
What’s one of your favorite memories from the Olympics?
My younger son, Elliott, became totally hooked on the Olympic experience, and when the Olympics were in London in 2012, he said ‘Let’s go.’ My older son was married and had a 4-month-old son, and we took him to the Olympics. One of the events was trampoline gymnastics and, as a 4-month-old, one thing that he could do was move his head up and down watching the gymnasts go up and down on the trampoline. He was caught by NBC’s cameras following the gymnasts going up and down on the trampoline and they showed it on TV … It was the 2012 Olympics that launched me into this more frequent attendance
at the Olympics.
