Despite repeated promises to stop the practice, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has had to remove names of holocaust victims from the names of deceased people that temple work has been performed for.
A group of holocaust survivors has withdrawn from talks with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Mormon church suffered criticism in the past when names of holocaust victims were found on the lists of temple work for the dead. The names were originally found in 1995, again in 2002, and talks have recently broke down between the church and a Jewish group representing holocaust survivors and their descendants.
The Mormons believe that a person may accept baptism after death, if a faithful Mormon in good standing stands in for the deceased during a temple ceremony. The deceased has the freedom to decide whether he chooses to accept the Baptism or not.
Many people who are not Mormons find the practice to be offensive, and names submitted to the church for temple work should be the names of the ancestors of the people who did the work. However, the person posthumously baptized is not necessarily the same person who submitted the names for temple work.
The complaint that caused the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants to walk away from talks with leaders of the Mormon church was over the names of holocaust victims being resubmitted for temple work, after the church promised to remove them. Laurence B. Wickman a member of the Quorum of the Seventy, issued a statement that it would stand by its promise not to baptize dead holocaust victims, according to the November 11, 2008 edition of the Deseret News.
The practice first came to the attention of the New York based group in the late 1990s, when leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ agreed to stop the practice of baptism for the dead for Jewish peole who were killed in concentration camps. The first request resulted in the names of 260,000 holocaust victims being removed from the names of people temple work had been done for.
The 1995 agreement defined the conditions under which Mormons mayy baptize victimes of the holcaust, according to Yahoo news. A spokesperson for the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descandants did not expect the Latter-day Saints to fundamentally alter their beliefs , but that the church should honor its previous agreements not to baptize holocaust victims.
The Mormon church maintains the largest geneological database in the world, and this resource is often used by hobbiests trying to trace their roots. The names in this database have been submitted for temple work, and records from many sources have been used to comprise it.
The practice of submitting names did not stop, forcing the Jewish advocacy group to repeat the request in December of 2002, seven years after the names were discovered in the database maintained by the Mormon church. Employees for the church removed the names again, but the Mormon leadership took no action to prevent the names from being resubmitted. Holocausts victims were found on the list of names submitted for temple work again in 2008. The church says that it will honor the agreements made with the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, but many names were resubmitted by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for posthumous baptism.
The decision for one Jewish group to walk away from the table is not the first time the practice of posthumous baptism has generated controversy. Many non-Mormons find the practice to be offensive and the Catholic church recently issued an edict preventing priests from giving out parish records to represantatives from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to Suite 101.com.
