November 11 2008, Deseret News, Holocaust survivors halt talks with LDS, by Elaine Jarvik,

November 11 2008, Deseret News, Holocaust survivors halt talks with LDS, by Elaine Jarvik,

Church surprised at 'unilateral' end to baptism negotiations

Summary

 

The LDS Church "stands by its word" not to perform posthumous baptisms for Holocaust victims, church officials said Monday, after a group of Holocaust survivors held a press conference in New York announcing it is breaking off negotiations with the church.

The LDS Church "stands by its word" not to perform posthumous baptisms for Holocaust victims, church officials said Monday, after a group of Holocaust survivors held a press conference in New York announcing it is breaking off negotiations with the church.

The rift follows a Nov. 3 meeting in New York between leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and members of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. Three days later, LDS Church officials sent a letter to American Gathering honorary chairman Ernest Michel praising the "atmosphere of trust, honesty, and candor" of that meeting, and noting that, "What remains is to develop a mechanism to facilitate that mutual understanding by monitoring progress."

Elder Lance B. Wickman of the Quorums of the Seventy said Monday the church was surprised and disappointed by Michel's "unilateral" ending of negotiations, stating that the church has "acted in good faith" throughout 14 years of conversations with Holocaust survivors.

The survivors have complained that the church's practice of offering church membership to the deceased has allowed members to forward the names of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps for baptism by proxy, a practice that Michel believes alters their Jewishness.

"They tell me that my parents' Jewishness has not been altered, but ... 100 years from now, how will they be able to guarantee that my mother and father of blessed memory who lived as Jews and were slaughtered by Hitler for no other reason than they were Jews, will someday not be identified as Mormon victims of the Holocaust?" Michel said Monday.

The LDS Church's letter to Michel said the church is "pained by the perception" that the LDS Church is acting disrespectfully toward Holocaust victims and their families.

"We believe there is no faith group outside of Judaism itself that nurtures a deeper or more cordial feeling toward the people of Judah ... than we do," the letter said.

"It greatly distorts the true intent of our doctrines and religious practices when it is said that our temple work changes the 'Jewishness' of a person or that it somehow affects his ethnicity or visits upon him something that detracts from the significance of his life or the way he died. Once again we reaffirm to you that our temple and family history work does none of these things," the letter, signed by Elder Marlin K. Jensen and Elder Wickman, also said.

In 1995, Mormon and Jewish leaders signed an agreement stipulating that Mormons, when forwarding names of potential baptisms, could only enter the names of Holocaust victims to whom they were directly related. The church also agreed to remove the names of Holocaust victims already entered into its genealogical database, and since then has removed 260,000 names.

Most of those names were submitted by nine people from four lists of Holocaust victims, Elder Wickman said. The church also has since removed 43,000 additional names, 42,000 of them identified by the church, he said. Some of those, he said, were resubmissions of some of the original 260,000 by "well-meaning members."

Independent Salt Lake researcher Helen Radkey has conducted ongoing monitoring of the database since 2005, which she says shows both resubmissions and new entries of names of European Jews, some as recently as July 2008. In 2006, the name of Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who spent the rest of his life hunting down Nazi perpetrators, was removed from the database.

It is this new, recurring list of names that angers the American Gathering. "Baptism of a Jewish Holocaust victim and then merely removing that name from the database is just not acceptable," Michel said Monday. "We ask you to leave our 6 million Jews, all victims of the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough."

According to Elder Wickman, technological improvements in the church's database — the new FamilySearch system — will discourage the submission of large lists of unrelated individuals to be baptized posthumously.

"The names of any Holocaust victims we can identify in the database are to be flagged with a special designation — 'not available for temple ordinances,"' Elder Wickman and Elder Jensen, church historian, explained in their Nov. 6 letter to Michel.

In that letter, Elders Jensen and Wickman also proposed reconvening a committee of LDS Church and American Gathering representatives "to resolve allegations of violations of our understanding, and report its conclusions to all parties."

Contributing: The Associated Press Archived