by Tng Ying Hui
Lee was concerned that working with the Israelis directly on military training would “provoke grassroots antipathy from Malay Muslims in Singapore and Malaysia”, according to his autobiography, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000. Hence, he waited to see if India and Egypt would help. But in their response, while they wished Singapore well, neither Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri nor Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser referred to Lee’s request for assistance. Lee and Dr Goh decided to proceed with the Israelis as the country’s military advisers.
The Israeli government assigned then-Colonel Yaakov Elazari, also known as Jack, to the job. Since 17, he had been a soldier with the Palmach, an elite division of the Israeli underground army that was fighting for an independent Jewish state. His father, who died when Yaakov was four, had always wanted him to become a military officer. The Palmach became the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) when Israel gained independence in 1948. Elazari remained in the army and became a colonel in its infantry unit.
In 1965, Elazari was slated to command a brigade in the IDF and was hesitant to move to another country. But when he heard about Singapore’s predicament, he was deeply moved by the country’s nation-building endeavour as it was similar to what Israel had experienced.
During his first visit to Singapore in November 1965, Elazari drove around the island and picked an old British military training site in a thickly vegetated area called Pasir Laba. He felt it was suitable for the development of a military training institute where the hills would serve as stop butts for live firing exercises. He proposed that buildings be constructed around a huge parade ground and asked Ho Pak Tho, who was then the site engineer from the Public Works Department, if he could put up the basic facilities for SAFTI within three months. Without hesitation,
Ho agreed.
After evaluating the state of affairs in Singapore and the skills that would be needed to build a credible defence force, Elazari returned home to assemble his team of Israeli soldier-trainers. A month later in December, he and his team arrived in Singapore. They came separately as they did not want to draw attention to their delegation. To disguise their presence, Singapore officials referred to them as “Mexicans”.
The Israelis were clear in their mission. They would be advisers to the Singapore army and would provide help based on their experiences. Their principle was that Singaporeans had to take charge of their own future. The SAF had to develop its own operational doctrines and training requirements.
With this in mind, Elazari and his colleague, Yehuda Golan, designed a preparatory course. Elazari supervised and planned the course, which commenced on 15 February 1966. Training for the prepatory course took place at Jurong Town Primary School while SAFTI at Pasir Laba was under construction.
The cohort of trainees was a hodgepodge group of 60 men from the two existing army regiments, the police force and the Singapore Volunteer Corps. Initially, training started from the basics to get everyone on the same page, but this proved a mistake as the Israelis did not take into consideration that there were many experienced soldiers in the group. Some had served in actual security operations during Konfrontasi and racial riots.
After two weeks, the trainees began to express their objections. The course was adjourned after discussions with George Bogaars, then-permanent secretary of Ministry of the Interior and Defence, while Elazari and his team redesigned the course structure in a matter of two weeks. The revised syllabus acknowledged the military expertise of the trainees and taught them new skills like how to fight in built-up areas, use new US AR15 rifles for live-firing training and navigate at night. They were also taught battle drills. During the training, the Israelis imparted to the trainees the importance of leading their troops by example. For instance, in military exercises and on the battlefield, they should lead the assault. They emphasised battle discipline and teamwork in the trainees.
By May 1966, the trainees graduated and became the first cohort of instructors for 300 enlistees at SAFTI that year. The graduates were placed in various positions in SAFTI to ensure that all parts of the institute would benefit from the knowledge and capabilities that the Israelis had passed down during training. Some graduates were appointed key staff officers at the headquarters, while others took on roles as company commanders and platoon instructors. In July 1967, some from the first batch of 300 enlistees at SAFTI were commissioned as officers and went on to lead the pioneer batch of 900 full-time national servicemen.
Elazari once told his friend, Colonel (Rtd) Ramachandran Menon, a fable that summed up his views about life. There were two frogs that fell into a bucket of milk. The more educated frog, believing that his efforts would be futile, gave up kicking and died. But the other frog, though less schooled, was used to life in the raw, and so it kept kicking and swimming around, refusing to give up. Its efforts eventually churned the milk into butter and the frog was able to stand on the butter and escape from the pail. Colonel Menon said, “Elazari believed Singapore, though small, will survive if it keeps trying”
Throughout his time in Singapore from 1966 to 1969, Elazari stayed with his wife, Nurit, and two children in a hotel on Orchard Road, an area where other Jewish families lived as well. Later, they moved to an apartment at Balmoral Park. Elazari and his family kept a low profile, not wanting to draw attention to why he was in Singapore. Once, when their telephone rang, a neighbour who heard it asked how they were able to get a telephone line so quickly when others were still waiting for theirs.
Before Elazari left Singapore in 1969, he was presented with a Sword of Honour, the traditional award for the top cadet officer. He returned to Israel where he continued working in the IDF and was promoted to Brigadier-General. But he never got to lead a battalion in the IDF as he wished, and was asked to be an army spokesman instead. His response to his new role was, “I am not a talking man, I want to be with the soldiers,” recounted his wife Nurit. Elazari subsequently left the military to start his own trading business in computerised machinery.
In 1982, Elazari’s son Zahi died in the Lebanon war at the age of 25. According to his family, Elazari plunged into abject sorrow and buried himself in his work. The business faltered as Israel’s economy was hit by rising inflation. On June 1989, Elazari went to the hospital for cardiac catheterisation, a medical procedure used to diagnose and treat certain heart conditions. He died after the procedure, leaving behind Nurit and his daughter Nili, who still live in Israel today.
References
Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: the Singapore Story, 1965-2000
(Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings, 2000).
Ramachandran Menon, One of a Kind (Singapore: SAFTI Military Institute, 2007).
“The Singapore Army is established,” HistorySG, accessed September 2015,
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/history/events/b125c943-1be5-4f98-99e1-68586e83de29
Interviews with Nurit Elazari and Nili Elazari over the phone in June 2015.
Interviews with Colonel (Rtd) Ramachandran Menon, Lieutenant-General (Rtd) Winston Choo and Col (Rtd) Tan Peng Ann in June 2015.
BG Yaakov ‘Jack’ Elazari
Israel, 1929-1989
Prof Thomas Harold Elliott
A Trade Union Stalwart
Briton T.H. Elliott fought cheek by jowl with workers for fairer wages and treatment, and went on to set up the NTUC Co-operatives in the 1970s. When he died in 1977, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew called Prof Elliott’s death a “loss to the NTUC and to all of us who have worked with him in the past.”
Prof Thomas Harold Elliott (T.H. Elliott) was born in the UK in 1914. His father, a house painter, earned a meagre income. When his father passed away, his mother took in tenants to help pay the bills. At 16, he received a scholarship to study medicine but gave it up to work as an apprentice pharmacist. After work, he cycled 20 miles to attend night classes in Pharmacy where he met his future wife, Nan. During World War II, he worked as the chief pharmacist at a hospital and w
hen the war ended, he left for South Africa to study at the University of Johannesburg. “That experience radicalised him,” said his son, Dr John Elliott, a psychology professor at the NUS.
In South Africa, Prof Elliott witnessed the suffering brought about by apartheid. This left him with a deep-seated dislike for racial discrimination and made him even more staunchly anti-colonial. He was galvanised to work in countries like Singapore where he could help pave the way to independence. “Rule by her own people was the necessary and inevitable future for Singapore and it was necessary to do what one could to hasten this process,” Prof Elliott said in a 1973 interview with The Straits Times. He moved to Singapore with his wife, Nan, and their three children in 1950.
Shortly after he arrived, Prof Elliott worked with Lee Kuan Yew, then a young lawyer helping union workers to negotiate better terms from their colonial employers. Lee trusted Prof Elliott because he had rejected the cosy expatriate allowance package offered to him by the University of Malaya. Dr John Elliott said, “[My father] did not believe that an expatriate should receive more salary and more privileges than a local staff.” At the same time, Prof Elliott worked as a lecturer at the Department of Pharmacy at the University of Malaya in Singapore, which later became the University of Singapore.
In December 1952, 10,000 members of the Naval Base Labour Union went on strike, demanding better wages and working conditions. Prof Elliott and Lee were called on to arbitrate between the union and the Admiralty of London. The strike ended when enough concessions were given to the workers.
When the PAP was formed in 1954, Prof Elliott joined it as it was “the only party in Singapore with honesty and integrity”. But disagreeing with the cadre structure instituted in 1957, he left the party, though he remained a supporter, said John.
In 1960, he became the first head of the Department of Pharmacy at the University of Malaya to have a doctorate. He was a dedicated researcher, often camping overnight in laboratories to work on his experiments. He told his students “to be bold” in their inquiries, said Prof R. Karunanithy, who was his student and later his colleague for 10 years.
Throughout the next decade, Prof Elliott juggled his duties as a professor and his involvement with the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), which was set up in 1961.
After Singapore’s separation from Malaysia in 1965, Prof Elliott foresaw that labour strikes would “rock the boat” of Singapore’s “precariously small economy”, as he wrote in Perjuangan, NTUC’s monthly newsletter in 1969. Instead of pitting workers against employers, Prof Elliott suggested that the unions focus on consensus-building among workers, employers and the government. This approach became known as the Singapore brand of tripartism. Strikes were no longer the best channel to fight for better wages, Prof Elliott pointed out. Instead, he helped to formulate the blueprints of three social enterprises which would benefit rank and file workers: NTUC Income; NTUC Welcome, which is now known as NTUC FairPrice; and the NTUC Co-operative Commonwealth For Transport (Comfort).
NTUC Income, which started in 1970, was formed with the intention to provide insurance for the lower-income workers. There was demand for the policies—in 1972, NTUC Income sold $30 million worth of policies. NTUC Welcome opened its doors in 1973, helping to stabilise prices of goods and make essentials remain affordable. Inflation was greater than 20% because of the oil crisis. Within four years, seven supermarkets had been set up.
NTUC Comfort targeted the problem of pirate or “ali baba” taxis that were running rampant on the streets. These pirate taxis were controlled by rogue operators who sold licences at exorbitant prices. With NTUC Comfort set up in 1970, taxi drivers were no longer subjected to this exploitative system.
Nan, Prof Elliot’s wife, supported her husband wholeheartedly. She completed a PhD in Physiology and taught that subject at the University of Singapore and was actively involved in social work. The couple would invite residents of the York Hill Girls’ Homecraft Centre, a girl’s home, to their house during the weekends.
At the University of Singapore, Prof Elliott pushed for the Department of Pharmacy, which was under the Faculty of Medicine, to be a school on its own. This would allow faculty members more autonomy in research and teaching. He succeeded in 1965—the Department of Pharmacy became the School of Pharmacy—but this was short–lived, as the School had fewer than 100 students and 10 staff. In 1974, a year after Prof Elliott stepped down as head of the School, it was converted to a department under the Faculty of Science.
Prof Elliott tried to keep in touch with ground sentiment in his older years, using public transport. But he would avoid NTUC Comfort taxis, his son explained, because the drivers recognised him and would not accept a fare.
In the last decade of his life, Prof Elliott’s longstanding heart condition and hypertension impaired his health and limited his work. In 1977, he died of a heart attack. His contribution to the labour force was recognised by all. At his passing, NTUC secretary-general Devan Nair said that he and his colleagues felt “amputated”. One of the awards that Prof Elliott was most proud of was an NTUC medal conferred on him by Ho See Beng, another pioneer in the labour movement, in 1963. Prof Elliott was indeed a man who spent all his life caring tirelessly for ordinary men and women.
References
Chin Harn Tong, interviewed by Irene Lim Ai Lin, October 23 1991,
accession number 001311/01, transcript, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore.
“Comfort has Proved Sceptics Wrong: Elliott,” The Straits Times, December 5, 1975.
Lee Hsien Loong, “For The People, From The Heart” (Speech at NTUC FairPrice 40th Anniversary Dinner, October 2015) http://www.pmo.gov.sg/mediacentre/speech-prime-minister-lee-hsien-loong-ntuc-fairprice-40th-anniversary-dinner
“Modernisation: Cooperatives, Bank, Labour College,” Perjuangang, November 1969.
“NTUC 1970s,” National Trades Union Congress, accessed August 2015.
“Prof Elliott: NTUC’s Pillar of Strength,” The Straits Times, July 15, 1973.
“Singapore in South East Asia,” Perjuangan, December 1972.
“The Scientific Crucible: Scientific Education in NUS since 1929,” NUS Libraries, Science Library, 2009, http://www.lib.nus.edu.sg/ilp/scrt/pub/scientific_crucible.pdf
“Tom Elliott, his Vision, Ideals and Dedication to a New Order,” The Straits Times, May 10, 1977.
“Tom Elliott dies,” The Straits Times, May 9, 1977.
V.R. Balakrishna, “A Brief history of the Singapore Trade Union Movement,” in
NTUC Workers’ Education Series (Secretary for Information and Publicity, 1976).
Interviews with Dr John Elliott and Professor Karunanithy s/o Ramasamy in June 2015.
Prof Thomas Harold Elliott
United Kingdom, 1914-1977
Christine Laimer
Breaking Bread with the Needy
In 2003, Austrian Christine Laimer set up Food from the Heart to distribute bread to the needy. Today, the non-profit organisation has 1,700 volunteers, and through various programmes, reaches out to 24,600 beneficiaries across Singapore each month.
In 2002, when Christine Laimer read in The Straits Times that local bakeries were dumping their leftover bread, it struck her that she could distribute the unsold bread to the needy instead. “It was one of those moments when I had to decide: do I just keep my mouth shut and not act on it? Or do I put into action what’s already forming in my mind?” said Christine. Her daughter, Mercedes, was then eight months old but Christine decided that she could raise her child and also do something to help alleviate hunger among the needy. Thus began Food from the Heart (FFTH) in February 2003. She became CEO and her husband, Henry Laimer, chaired the board. Today, FFTH distributes 28,000kg of unsold bread each month to some 15,000 people across households and welfare homes in Singapore.
Christine, who studied interior design in school, had never run a non-profit organisation. The Laimers had come to Singapore to start a business building automat
ic warehouses. But once she set her mind on helping the needy, she swung into action. She started by cold-calling restaurants, bakeries and hotels. Said Christine, “I received a resounding result—all the bakeries I approached came on board!” Although some hotels were initially worried that consumers might fall sick after eating unsold bread, they also took to the idea upon hearing that the Grand Hyatt hotel had signed up. Today, FFTH receives support from more than 100 hotels and bakeries. With the help of The Sunday Times and radio station Gold 90.5FM, Christine launched a volunteer recruitment drive. More than 100 people came forward to offer their help. Christine wasted no time in getting the volunteers started. “We would tell them, ‘If you’re okay to volunteer, we have this route on Monday and this other route on Tuesday.’ We trained them immediately and printed their volunteer identification cards on the spot. They were ready to start the next day,” she said. Volunteers were also put on standby until 11.30 every night in case they needed to replace others who could not fulfil their duties. Among the volunteers, there were 50 CityCab drivers who offered to help with the deliveries. Christine said that the organisation could not have taken off without a team of “extraordinary volunteers and staff members” who were always ready to help.
FFTH also won the support of organisations like the Central Singapore Community Development Council (CDC) and Fujitsu Asia. The CDC gave FFTH office space to coordinate its volunteer recruitment drive, while Fujitsu provided it with a tailor-made tracking device to record the number of loaves and buns collected and delivered each day. To determine the beneficiaries of FFTH, Christine began researching which welfare homes to include. She took into consideration their financial status, and the number and dietary requirements of the home’s residents. This information was fed into FFTH’s database. She then devised a delivery system which was easy to use for the volunteers and would ensure that the bread would reach its beneficiaries in good time.