Posted on 11/10/2008 4:10:01 PM PST by SJackson
NEW YORK - Holocaust survivors said Monday they were abandoning negotiations with the Mormon church over its posthumous baptisms of Jews who were killed in Nazi death camps.
Survivors claim elders of the Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints have refused to systemically search for and remove the names of Holocaust victims from their master genealogical database and have failed to prevent "zealots" from adding thousands of new Jewish names to the list in recent years - including thousands lifted from Yizkor books of Jews massacred at Berdichev in Ukraine.
"We are not going to continue meeting with the Mormon Church," said Auschwitz survivor Ernest Michel, head of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, who has spearheaded efforts to scrub the Mormon lists since discovering in the 1990s that his parents were among 380,000 Holocaust victims having been baptized into the Christian faith.
Gary Motokoff, a Jewish genealogist who participated in meetings with Mormon leaders, described the negotiations as "fruitless."
"We go round and round, and they refuse to change their position," Motokoff the The Jerusalem Post.
He and Michel claimed the church had failed to enforce rules it agreed to in 1995 to prevent Holocaust victims' names from being added and had not reprimanded those who moved to restore thousands that had been removed form baptismal lists.
"The Church's actions show disrespect for us - they revise history, intentionally or not," said Michel, who cited July correspondence with church leaders at a Manhattan news conference in which elders stated they would only remove the names of Jewish Holocaust victims upon request rather than conducting their own records search.
"Leave our six million people, all victims, alone," Michel said. "They have suffered enough."
According to Mormon teaching, posthumous baptism - done through a living proxy - does not automatically override a dead person's Jewishness but merely opens the door for the soul to accept or reject Mormon teaching. Dead celebrities from Albert Einstein to Pope John Paul II have been posthumously baptized by Mormon proxies seeking to help the dead enter heaven.
The Church responded by releasing correspondence dated November 6, written after their last meeting with Michel's group on November 3, in which leaders insisted that the practice of posthumous baptism has no effect on the "Jewishness" of a person.
"The effect of baptism by proxy or any other ordinance for the dead is to make an offer, which the individual may choose to accept. If not accepted, the ordinance is of no effect," wrote Marlin Jensen, a church elder.
Jensen added that the church is in the process of upgrading its genealogical database and will flag the names of any Holocaust victims as ineligible for baptism or other ordinances except at the request of immediate surviving family members.
Jensen also proposed establishing a joint review committee to address specific concerns over the addition of names.
"Everyone has agreed that we don't want the names of Holocaust victims on the [master database]," Michael Otterson, head of public affairs for the Church, told the Post. "The problem is how to prevent it - it's like trying to get everyone to comply with the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit, so we've been very reluctant to guarantee those names won't appear."
Otterson claimed the new system would "substantially reduce if not eliminate" the problem by requiring submitters to explain their own genealogical link to those they want baptized - as much to address the Holocaust victims issue as to prevent other "mischief" involving celebrities.
But he said the Church would not agree to automatically remove anyone with Jewish-sounding names, instead requiring Jewish groups to continue supplying names of victims, out of concern that a legitimate baptism might be accidentally purged and thereby denied the right to reach heaven.
Independent researcher Helen Radkey, who began canvassing Mormon lists for people with Jewish names after learning that Dutch diarist Anne Frank had been posthumously baptized, scoffed at the proposal. She said the church had failed to remove all 380,000 known Holocaust victims' names after the 1995 agreement with Michel's group, while her searches of closed databases revealed many baptized Mormons with typically Jewish names like Solomon or Esther who had died between 1941 and 1945.
"The list problem is something the church could have cracked down on, should have cracked down on, and has not cracked down on," Radkey told the Post. She said the database could be easily compared against lists from Yad Vashem or other Holocaust clearinghouses.
Yet Holocaust survivor Roman Kent, who appeared with Michel and Radkey, said he felt the issue was far simpler.
"Forget the lists - it is not a numbers game," Kent said at a press conference held in Manhattan. "If it is even 100 people, it is too many."
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Not an earthshaking issue, but one that generates some low level friction in some quarters.
I’m kinda at a loss of words. Weird.
I’d be offended too if they did this to one of my relatives. I don’t believe in the teachings of that church and neither did they.
If you are a real Jew, then you believe that the Mormon religion is false. So what’s the problem?
I’m a Catholic. If Mormons want to “baptize” members of my defunct family, so what? I don’t believe it will have any effect.
I’m not saying that to be critical of Mormons. They have a right to their religion, Jews have a right to theirs, and I have a right to mine, as long as nobody gets hurt.
And I doubt either Einstein or JPII would've cared a whit.
Exactly. They can baptise whatever/whoever they want in my opinion...does no harm and has meaning only to them.
Talk about the height of presumptuousness. Not that it would have any effect whatsoever on dead people but still very ballsy and strange.
What would make even more sense is to clone dead non-Mormons using DNA from their remains and raise them proper-Mormon-like. Hey, if they can’t get it right the first time...
It’s kind of like a pergatory thing...Mormons baptise the dead so that their souls can go on to heaven...
Sorry, “Purgatory.” I always seem to catch my spelling errors after I’ve posted.
Don’t forget the name tag.
The murdered jewish people were killed because they were jewish.
It is horrible that they would have their religion taken away after their deaths.
I would like them to stop too. But at the end of the day, the dead don’t care.
...stepping on their graves anyway.
I am of the opinion that as long as they are injring no one let stupid people do whatever keeps them amused. It keeps them busy from doing something even stupider.
Post-mortem babtisms are laughably ridiculous and should have been ignored
I just don’t get it.
The basic Bible teaching is of free will. You either chose Jesus God or not. While you are alive.
Why would someone praying or baptizing me after I die affect my free will choice to choose Christ or reject Him? How would that change my eternal resting place from heaven to hell or vice versa?
The miracle of Christianity is free will. God will never force a person to love Him or not. Or choose him or not.
The Mormon beliefs are so whack when analyzed that you just have to cringe.
Joseph Smith had a vision before he died to put Pentagrams on every Mormon Temple. To this day they are there. Very weird dude.
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