“We got hit by a rocket from Iran, and then we got robbed,” Jake Teper posted to his Instagram account on June 22.
Teper is a native of Glendale and a graduate of Nicolet High School and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He belonged to Congregation Shalom and was active in BBYO, and his Bar Mitzvah announcement was published in the Chronicle in 2009.
In 2020, during the pandemic, he went to Tel Aviv as part of a Masa program where he interned at an environmental tech startup. He “fell in love with Israel, and the culture, and the people,” he said, and opted to stay, opening a business called Yalla Bikes.
While he was never a “spandex-wearing biker” while growing up in Wisconsin, Teper always enjoyed cycling, including biking to class during his years in Madison.
In an interview with the Chronicle, Teper described Yalla Bikes as “a bike shop where we do bike rentals and bike tours for tourists.” The shop also has a popular Instagram account, with more than 25,000 followers. In addition to promoting the shop itself, it features what Teper describes as “positive Tel Aviv content, cool places, and fun stuff to do.”
Over the weekend of June 21, as Iran was firing projectiles at Israel in retaliation for the Jewish state’s attacks on its nuclear sites, Yalla Bikes was damaged, and just hours after that, someone robbed the store, taking “locks, cash, tires, parts, and a few other things.”
“I love you all (except the person who robbed our shop),” the Instagram account said after the robbery. Teper saw what happened while watching live TV news in a bomb shelter.
Soon after that, Yalla Bikes launched a GoFundMe campaign, titled “Rebuild Yalla Bikes and Support Our Neighbors in Tel Aviv.” A link can be found at this story online.
“This isn’t just where I run my business – it’s where I walk my dog, get my coffee, and know the faces behind every storefront,” Teper said on the GoFundMe. “Some of those neighbors lost everything in seconds.”
“The idea,” Teper told the Chronicle, is to “take the minimal amount that I need to replace the things in my shop” to enable him to reopen, and also contribute to “neighbors, other shops in the area, and all the small businesses and people who have been affected by the rockets and the war in general.”
As of Monday June 23, just a few hours after it was created, the campaign had raised $6,675 out of a listed goal of $10,000.
How are Teper and the others around him holding up amid the attacks?
“Physically, everybody is okay. Mentally, it’s been tough,” he said. “It’s been a lot of early wakeups and middle-of-the-night wakeups every night, since this Iranian situation started.” He also described the damage to the shop as “really disheartening,” especially the theft, but he’s been trying to focus on the positive, especially the many people who came to help him fix up the shop. He also has no doubts about wanting to remain in Israel.
“It’s been five years, and I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon,” Teper said.
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