masthead spoke to Pulford in the hours after the shooting<\/a>, last Sunday; he was standing by the beach, in shock. The gunmen had been metres away. \u201cI could see them on the bridge from my van door,\u201d Pulford said. His voice was shaking. \u201cAfter five or six gunshots I ran [away from] the car park.\u201d He\u2019d jumped out of the van and fled to the surf club.<\/p>\nWhen he returned to his van, in which he had been living, the Simons were sitting inside. They say he was kind to them; he encouraged them to stay there while emergency services descended on the site, and then he escorted them away from the crime scene. A stranger drove them home. They did not get Pulford\u2019s contact number. They wished they had thanked him.<\/p>\n
That wish intensified when they saw footage of the attack and realised how close they had come to wandering into the path of the shooter. Every other van had been locked. Pulford\u2019s open door felt like \u201cour Hanukkah miracle\u201d, Benyomin Simons said.<\/p>\n
Simons\u2019 daughter was reading the Herald\u2019s Bondi coverage from the United States and saw a story quoting a man who had found an older couple in his van. She told her father, who contacted the masthead and asked to be put in touch with Pulford.<\/p>\n
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On Friday the Simons went back to Bondi to thank Pulford, whose van is still sitting in the same place as it did on Sunday. There were many thank-yous from the Simons\u2019 side, and protestations from Pulford\u2019s that they were undeserved. Benyomin Simons disagrees. \u201cWe very much appreciated what he did,\u201d he said. \u201cI am sure that getting into that van saved our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Simons said returning to the beach and meeting Pulford \u201cwas eerie but, in a way, therapeutic. It also shocked me because I didn\u2019t realise just how close we were.\u201d Both have had counselling, to begin what will be a slow recovery from the trauma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Benyomin and Raizel Simons were leaving the Bondi Hanukkah festival when the shots began. Younger people threw themselves…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[114,268,85,46,266,267],"class_list":{"0":"post-196032","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-finance","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-personal-finance","13":"tag-personalfinance"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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