 In 1968, he announced that Neiman-Marcus's buyers would give preference to companies employing and training significant numbers of minority employees, making his firm one of the first companies in the nation to have such a policy.The Marcus family had been among the founders of Dallas' Temple Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue that is today the largest in the Southwest.Stanley Marcus became a leading figure in the temple in the 1950s and a member of the American Council for Judaism despite being largely a secular Jew who once joked that he was afraid to visit Israel "because he might be converted."