Coffee for a cause
Iron Dome Coffee’s fundraiser helps supply an IDF unit
One of the most basic truths of the Jewish community is that everything connects. Eventually, everyone connects. And passion and intensity can help connections happen faster, and somehow make them even stickier.
Justin Yehuda knows that.
Mr. Yehuda is a 25-year-old entrepreneur; he grew up in Tenafly and went to the Solomon Schechter School of Bergen County (now streamlined as Schechter Bergen) and then to the Leffell School, the Schechter high school in Westchester County. As the son of an Israeli father in a Jewishly involved family, and constant visitor to Israel, and the cousin to many Israelis, quite a few of them in the IDF, he’s been connected to the Jewish state throughout his life.
When he graduated from Cornell in May 2023, Mr. Yehuda assumed that he’d go into the corporate world. It’s what people like him are expected to do. But then October 7 happened, just a few months later, and he decided that he could both start a business and make a difference in the world with that business, because, after all, everything connects.
Last March, Mr. Yehuda set up Iron Dome Coffee. Eighteen percent of it goes to organizations that help wounded Israeli soldiers and other Israeli causes; also, because Mr. Yehuda is not only a lover of Israel but also a serious businessman, the coffee is chosen, prepared, and sold with an eye toward quality. It is, as he puts it, “coffee with a cause.”
It’s not an easy business. Mr. Yehuda promotes Iron Dome Coffee online — he’s an online native, and so are many, although far from all of his customers. Hate flows freely online, and much of it is aimed at anyone promoting Israel. But despite that, the company is flourishing. “It’s been a year and a half, and it’s growing rapidly,” Mr. Yehuda said. “We have massive reach now, and we’re becoming a household name in the pro-Israel world.”
So Mr. Yehuda took a short break for a summer vacation. He and two friends from Schechter Bergen rented a villa in Thailand. It was cheap, he said — “like $20 a day, and the place was beautiful, with a little pool and an outdoor area, and we got to live like kings for just a little bit.”
He’d known that Thailand is a mecca for vacationing Israelis, but he hadn’t realized exactly how many Israelis until he got there. They weren’t all just out of the army, although most were young; “some people had been there five times,” he said. “The way I explain it is that Israelis have Birthright and Israelis have Thailand.
“Some towns have Hebrew street signs,” he said. “They sell shawarma. There was a Chabad that we went to.
“We’d go out every day and meet a bunch of new people, and we’d invite all these Israelis and we would make a barbecue and have some beers and enjoy life.”
One of the Israelis to whom Mr. Yehuda and his friends grew close was Dael. “He’s a nice kid, he’s in good shape, and he was a fun guy to hang out with,” Mr. Yehuda said. “He’s 20 years old; he was like our little brother on that trip.
“On the last night of the trip, we were like, ‘What are you gonna do after this trip?’ and he said, ‘I’m going back to fight in Lebanon,’ and I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’
“He had been fighting in Lebanon, he was on a two-week break, and he decided to go to Thailand.”
The vacation ended, and everyone went back home and back to work. “The next time I heard from Dael, he sent me a WhatsApp message saying that his team didn’t have the proper equipment or supplies that they needed, and they were looking to raise some money.
“First of all, I was flattered that he asked me to help. That he thought of me, to help make an impact for him and his unit. So I posted a nice video about it on my social media pages, and I put it in the newsletter that I send to my 22,000 subscribers.
“That was like the business equivalent of a regular day on the job. It wasn’t crazy. But I was able to tap into this platform that I have built over the last year and a half, and what happened was crazy.
“Dael said that whatever I could raise would be amazing for him. And I said that I would set the bar super high. I want to raise $5,000. I figured, let me shoot for the stars here. He said, ‘That’s crazy. If you could do that, it would just be insane.’
“What was really crazy is that we hit that mark in one day. And Dael didn’t even know it then. He was in the field, with barely any signal. When his phone finally caught a bar of service, he found out that thousands of Americans he’d never met covered everything.
“It’s now over $13,000, and it’s been up for less than a week.”
The 18 percent of his profit that he sends to Israel goes through Belev Echad, an international nonprofit that, according to its website, belevechad.nyc, is “dedicated to restoring wounded IDF soldiers back to life through physical, medical, legal, emotional, and financial support.” He is working with that group on this fundraiser too.
Mr. Yehuda is gratified because “not only did I start a company that’s grown daily, but this is evidence to me that it’s making a real difference in the world. This is the biggest thing I’ve done in my one and a half years of business.
“I cannot wait to see what it will be in five years, 10 years, 20 years, now that I know that fundraising is a channel that I can actively tap into and I can do at a high level.
“I cannot wait to see the type of impact that we can have for Israel over the long run.”
The fundraiser will stay open until September 10. To learn more, go to irondomecoffee.com; to donate, go to irondomecoffee.com/dael. Iron Dome Coffee’s Instagram is @irondomecoffee.