Reform rabbis of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in the United States and Canada were urged today to participate in a boycott against the Standard Oil Company of California” (SOCAL). In a letter to Otto N. Miller, chairman of the board of SOCAL, Rabbi Joseph B. Glaser, executive vice-president of the CCAR, informed the company that he was cancelling his personal “active” account and informing his colleagues to join him in a boycott against their products and services.
Rabbi Glaser sharply condemned SOCAL’s “ill disguised call for one-sided support for the Arabs, in their intransigent struggle against the State of Israel.” He further charged SOCAL with “blatantly financially motivated intrusion into the delicate area of Middle East politics.”
He added, “It would seem to me that after all of the trouble in which ITT has gotten itself, you would have been a little more cautious about playing the crude game of multi-national corporate power politics. You are particularly vulnerable because of all of the questions that are being asked most seriously about the overall integrity of the major oil companies, which, it is now generally agreed, seem to have deliberately created the so-called energy crisis.”
The letter to Miller included Rabbi Glaser’s destroyed credit card with the company.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
