he never serve NS talk so big

WHENEVER Senior Counsel Harry Elias, 72, recalls his days at St Andrew's School from 1945 to 1954, one vivid scene inevitably comes to mind.

Before each competitive game, the Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu players of the school rugby team would huddle and pray together.

'They all prayed to their own gods, but they all prayed together,' says the son of Baghdadi Jewish immigrants, who is today one of Singapore's leading lawyers.

The unusual ritual puzzled onlookers then, but to the young and impressionable Harry, it embodied the racial and religious freedoms his parents could not enjoy back in Iraq.

His parents, Mr Elias Jonas and Ms Sophie Reuben, left their country with their families at the turn of the 20th century, during the reign of the Ottoman empire.

Because of the lack of opportunities at home, many Jews sought better lives in the east, says Mr Elias, who took his father's first name as his last.

His father, then in his early 20s, became a successful merchant who ran four knick-knack shops along Arab Street, while his mother, in her mid-teens, was a housewife and midwife. She also volunteered as a chevra kadisha, who prepares the dead for burial.

Mr Elias is the youngest of 12 children, 10 of whom survived.

Back then, about 30 family members lived together in a rented bungalow in Burmah Road, off Serangoon Road, where Mr Elias was born.

'It was cramped, we didn't have modern sanitation. The faeces used to be collected in a bucket,' recalls Mr Elias, who spoke to his parents in Arabic and Malay.

They never went hungry, but meals were straightforward affairs. Boiled chicken feet with rice and saffron was a common item on their menu.

Life might have been simple, but what struck the Sephardic Jewish family was the lack of anti-Semitism in their new home.

'We never found any discrimination any time, any place, anywhere,' he says firmly. He recounts how his school principal recognised Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, as a holiday for his Jewish students.

Almost everyone was an immigrant then, so there was no reason to view others as trespassers, Mr Elias points out.

Although he had lost both parents by the age of 22, Mr Elias was able to pursue his dreams because many doors were open to him. A string of scholarships took him through to university in Britain, where he studied law.

He was called to the Singapore Bar in 1969, and started his own firm here in 1988. Today, Harry Elias Partnership is a top law firm.

Mr Elias is married to Ms Thelma Sharbanee, a Singapore-born Jew with Iraqi roots. They have two children each from previous marriages.

He is keenly aware that his success would have been unlikely elsewhere: 'This is the country that gave me every bloody opportunity I could get. No one hindered it, not a single obstacle.'