Jewish group wants Mormons to stop proxy baptisms

Jewish group wants Mormons to stop proxy baptisms

By DEEPTI HAJELA and JENNIFER DOBNER

NEW YORK (AP) — Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying tonegotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, saying the church has repeatedlyviolated a 13-year-old agreement barring the practice.

Leaders of TheChurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints say they are making changes to their massive genealogical database to make it moredifficult for names of Holocaust victims to be entered for posthumous baptism by proxy, a rite that has been a common Mormon practice formore than a century.

But Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering ofHolocaust Survivors, said that is not enough. At a news conference in New York City on Monday, he said the church also must "implementa mechanism to undo what you have done."

"Baptism of a Jewish Holocaust victim and then merely removing that namefrom the database is just not acceptable," said Michel, whose parents died at Auschwitz. He spoke on the 70th anniversary ofKristallnacht, the Nazi-incited riots against Jews.

"We ask you to respect us and our Judaism just as we respect yourreligion," Michel said in a statement released ahead of the news conference. "We ask you to leave our six million Jews, all victimsof the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough."

Michel said talks with Mormon leaders, held as recently as last week, areover. He said his group will not sue, and that "the only thing left, therefore, is to turn to the court of public opinion."

In 1995, the church agreed not to perform baptisms or other rites forHolocaust victims, except in the very rare instances when they have living descendants who are Mormon.

Church spokesman Mike Otterson said Michel's decision to publicly denouncethe church seems like a unilateral termination of the discussion. "Those steps by Mr. Michel on behalf of the American Gathering were bothunnecessary and unfortunate and belie the long and valued mutual respect that we have had in past years," Otterson said in ane-mail.

Posthumous baptism by proxy allows faithful Mormons to have theirancestors baptized into the 178-year-old church, which they believe reunites families in the afterlife.

Using genealogy records, the church also baptizes people who have diedfrom all over the world and from different religions. Mormons stand in as proxies for the person being baptized and immerse themselves ina baptismal pool.

Only the Jews have an agreement with the church limiting who can bebaptized, though the agreement covers only Holocaust victims, not all Jewish people. Jews are particularly offended by baptisms ofHolocaust victims because they were murdered specifically because of their religion.

Michel suggested that posthumous baptisms of Holocaust victims play intothe hands of Holocaust deniers. "They tell me, that my parents' Jewishness has not been altered but ... 100 yearsfrom now, how will they be able to guarantee that my mother and father of blessed memory who lived as Jews and were slaughtered byHitler for no other reason than they were Jews, will someday not be identified as Mormon victims of the Holocaust?" Michel saidMonday.

Under the agreement with the Holocaust group, Mormons could enter thenames of only those Holocaust victims to whom they were directly related. The church also agreed to remove the names of Holocaustvictims already entered into its massive genealogical database.

Otterson said the church has kept its part of the agreement by removingmore than 200,000 names from the genealogical index. But since 2005, ongoing monitoring of the database by an independentSalt Lake City-based researcher shows both resubmissions and new entries of names of Dutch, Greek, Polish and ItalianJews.

The researcher Helen Radkey, who has done contract work for the Holocaustgroup, said her research suggests that lists of Holocaust victims obtained from camp and government records are being dumped intothe database. She said she has seen and recorded a sampling of several thousand entries that indicate Mormonreligious rites, including baptisms, had been conducted for these Holocaust victims, some as recently as July.

"I've seen a steady procession of Jewish Holocaust names, especially nameswith camps linked to them, going to the International Genealogical Index," said Radkey, who acknowledges that she has limited access to therecords. "There's no possible way of knowing exactly how many names, but it's substantial."

Church officials say a new version of the database — called New FamilySearch — will fix the problems. In the works for six years, the new database will discourage the submission of large lists ofunrelated individuals. It will also separate names intended for temple rites from those submitted purely for genealogicalpurposes, the church states in a letter sent to Michel on Nov. 6.

"The names of any Holocaust victims we can identify in the database are tobe flagged with a special designation — not available for temple ordinances," the letter states.

The church also proposes jump-starting a monitoring committee formed in2005 to review database entries. The committee has met just once since 2005.

In May, the Vatican ordered Catholic dioceses worldwide to withhold member registries from Mormons so that Catholics couldnot be baptized.