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Benyomin and Raizel Simons were leaving the Bondi Hanukkah festival when the shots began. Younger people threw themselves under cars but the Simons were too old; their bodies wouldn’t allow it. A video of alleged shooter Sajid Akram shows how close they came to danger. As he fired towards the festival, they were just metres away.
They wove between cars, stopping to take cover until they found a van with its door open. Its owner, Josh Pulford, had already fled. The Simons climbed inside, hid and prayed. “At one point I looked up; the shooter was directly in line with the van, quite close,” Benyomin Simons said. “[Taking refuge in the van] actually saved my wife’s and my life.”
Metres from the gunmen, Benyomin and Raizel Simons found refuge in Josh Pulford’s unlocked van. They say it saved their lives.Credit: Louise Kennerley
This masthead spoke to Pulford in the hours after the shooting, last Sunday; he was standing by the beach, in shock. The gunmen had been metres away. “I could see them on the bridge from my van door,” Pulford said. His voice was shaking. “After five or six gunshots I ran [away from] the car park.” He’d jumped out of the van and fled to the surf club.
When 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’s contact number. They wished they had thanked him.
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’s open door felt like “our Hanukkah miracle”, Benyomin Simons said.
Simons’ daughter was reading the Herald’s 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.
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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’ side, and protestations from Pulford’s that they were undeserved. Benyomin Simons disagrees. “We very much appreciated what he did,” he said. “I am sure that getting into that van saved our lives.”
Simons said returning to the beach and meeting Pulford “was eerie but, in a way, therapeutic. It also shocked me because I didn’t realise just how close we were.” Both have had counselling, to begin what will be a slow recovery from the trauma.
“I feel as if we’ve been given another chance in this world, and that we have to try to push away the darkness in this world, that we have to bring more light; our job in this world is to bring light to the world by doing good deeds and helping people,” he says. “That’s what we want to try to do now among the Jewish people and the wider community because otherwise, why were we saved?”
Pulford enjoyed meeting the Simons, too. His van is still parked at Bondi and he’s not quite sure what to do next. “To be honest, everything has been moving fast in the past few days,” Pulford says. “I haven’t had a chance to process it.”
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