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."

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Contributing: The Associated Press

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com