Philanthropies seek divestment from Iran, Sudan

Darfurian children study in a makeshift school at a refugee camp in the movie Message from Home: Darfur Diaries. Photo courtesy Message from Home: Darfur Diaries

by
NJJN Staff Writer
07.12.07

The United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey and the Jewish Community Foundation of MetroWest NJ have passed separate resolutions calling for the divestment of all direct investments in companies that conduct non-humanitarian business in Sudan or Iran.

The resolutions were adopted by overwhelming margins on June 28 by the boards of the umbrella Jewish philanthropy and its endowments arm.

Invoking the Holocaust, the UJC and JCF resolutions called it "morally unacceptable to profit from or support" Sudan and Iran and urge "immediate action to sever direct economic ties to the economies of those countries."

Sudan has been accused of carrying out genocide in its southern Darfur region. The resolutions cite Iran's nuclear weapons program as well as its "policy of sponsoring terrorism."

Howard Rabner, chief operating officer/chief financial officer of UJC MetroWest, said the UJC's investment committee will follow the guidelines of the resolutions.

"Once the CRC [Community Relations Committee of UJC MetroWest] provides me with lists of securities that we should not be directly invested in, we will provide that information to our investment managers and ask them to sell any of those securities should we own them," said Rabner.

An initial review of such security lists provided by CRC indicated that "we do not [currently] own" any such securities, Rabner said.

(Information about companies targeted for divestment from Iran and Sudan is available on the CRC portion of the UJC Web site.)

Direct divestment — removing stocks of companies that deal directly with Sudan and Iran — would be relatively straightforward, said CRC director Lori Price Abrams. A more complicated scenario involves mutual funds, which contain many kinds of investments.

"We're part of a pack that's a national trend," Price Abrams said, referring to the growing number of "terror-free investment pools" that promote divestment from companies that deal with countries – including Sudan, Iran, and North Korea, among others — that are considered sponsors of terrorism.

"The demand is growing in society, and the CRC intends to try and help build that demand beyond our own divestment policy," she said. "More people are asking for them and it will make those companies [that do invest in the regions] think [about] their own policies to support those governments, because it won't be economically feasible to do so."

Price Abrams urged individuals to look at their own investment portfolios, and follow the lead of the UJC and JCF boards in divesting tainted stock.

In addition, she said, CRC will seek to galvanize community support through additional coalition efforts.

Although there is no "empirical evidence" that such strategies work, Stephen Flatow, former CRC chair, told NJ Jewish News "[divestment] allows each one of us to use our own investments to send a signal to the companies that allow Iran and the Sudan to make money, and to hit them where it hurts: in the pocketbook."