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.