Daniel Jundef // C&A Iron Works

I was born in Borough Park, but I grew up in the Georgetown area of Brooklyn. We moved to New Jersey when I was 12 years old. I am the youngest of three. My sister, who was born in Israel, is ten years older than me; my brother is five years older than me. Sadly, he recently passed away.
“My parents met in Israel. My mother is from Romania. My father’s family comes from Osoba, a small village in Poland. Before the war, my family were the rabbis of that village. My father’s father was trained as a rabbi in Poland, but when the war broke out, the family fled to the Soviet Union. They were sent to a labor camp in Siberia, where my father was born. My grandfather was drafted into the Red Army and helped liberate parts of Poland that he had lived in. At the end of the war, he deserted the Red Army and went back to get his family from the labor camp. They ended up in a refugee camp in Germany, then they were moved to a camp in Italy, and they eventually made it to Israel in 1949. My father was five years old at the time.
“They lived in a shanty on the dunes of Tel Aviv before they moved to a proper house in Hadar Yoseph. My father served in the Sinai Peninsula during the Six-Day War.
“In the late 1960s, all of the rich people in Tel Aviv started to get their first air conditioning units in their apartments. My father would install them in the windows of these apartment buildings. Those types of air conditioners required an iron cage around it for support, so he started to work with iron and learned how to weld. He had superhuman strength; he would put the unit on his shoulder and climb up a ladder to install it all by himself.
“My father moved to America in 1970. There was a recession in Israel, and he was struggling because he wanted to start his own business. It was a very difficult time to do that in Israel; there weren’t many startups at the time. His parents had already moved to America, so he came here with my mother and older sister.
“He immediately started working as a jack-of-all-trades. He worked as a mechanic, as an electrician, as a plumber and in HVAC. Through these jobs, he got a lot of contacts in the Jewish and specifically the heimish community. He would build porches for people in Borough Park, and he eventually branched off into doing cellar doors, railings and small extensions on houses. Over time he was able to establish more contacts in the neighborhood. He would do repair work on shuls, schools and yeshivahs. After years of this work, he became trusted by the community, because he proved that he could do the job, whatever it was.
“His past welding experience eventually led him into steel. He immediately started doing work for chasidic Jews in Borough Park because he spoke Yiddish. He started with smaller jobs and then transitioned into commercial and residential homes as well. The first big job he got was for the Bobov building on 48th Street. That project was a very big deal. It was the biggest shul in Borough Park at the time. All of the kids who learned in the yeshivah would recognize my father, and when some of them grew up and became contractors, they gave my father their business.
“He worked out of a small shop in Borough Park. He originally started working with a partner, but they split and he went out on his own. It was a very small company for a long time, but he did well for himself because he was strong and smart and did all of the physical work himself. He had a secretary who would do estimates and billing for him.
“There was a shop that had burned down on McDonald Avenue near Webster, and he was on the fence about buying it. He has a very strong relationship with Yehuda Rosenberg, the owner of Certified Lumber. He actually helped Yehuda rebuild Borough Park Lumber after it burned down. Yehuda encouraged my father to buy the shop. He did, and he was in that shop until 2010.
“Staying in Borough Park allowed my father to establish his company. Our community spreads things through word of mouth. When you establish a shop in Borough Park, people are going to talk about it in shul. That led to him getting jobs in Williamsburg, Midwood and Crown Heights.
“He built his business slowly. A general contractor hired him to do a medium-sized job; it was the same one who hired for the Bobov building. They saw how he worked and wanted to use him again.
“I’ve been around the business my whole life. As a teenager, I worked for my father as an ironworker every summer from the age of 14 to 17. It was a very taxing job. I was climbing steel and connecting it. But it was a great experience. I worked on some of his biggest projects with him. I was really inspired by him and this industry. One of our biggest projects was in Williamsburg, on Bedford and Ross—a big Satmar shul. Unfortunately, it was never finished, so now it’s just a large standing steel structure.
“Our family grew up very traditional. We were a secular/traditional Israeli style family. We kept the High Holidays, but we went to a conservative style shul. Growing up, I went to a school called East Midwood Jewish Center, which doesn’t exist anymore. When we moved to New Jersey in 1991, I went to public school. I went to American University in Washington D.C. for college and majored in visual media. Then I moved back to New York City.
“I wanted to be a cinematographer. My first job out of college was working as a production assistant in film and video for a company called CitiCam; they did behind-the-scenes shots, called EPK packages. They would send out a three-man crew to film the behind-the-scenes footage. We did this for many big headline NBC and ABC shows. I worked on the show ‘The Apprentice’ and met Donald Trump. I was 22 years old. I would work on low budget films and commercials. I started to move up and was working in audio, video and camera work. I remember doing camera work for an interview with John Kerry when he was running for president. On the weekends, I bought my own camera and would shoot weddings and bar mitzvahs for extra money.
“I struggled financially. Even though I enjoyed the industry, it was not financially rewarding.
“In 2006, the steel industry was booming. My father was working for people like Shaya Boymelgreen, a huge real estate developer. His company was doing a lot of development work and C&A Iron Works was getting extremely busy; they needed help. My brother, Shmuel, whom we called Shuki, was in the company for ten years before me. He always wanted to be in the business and went into it straight after college. He was able to help my father get more jobs, so there was an automatic growth.