LDS reaffirm accord with Jewish leaders

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has promised Jewish leaders again that it will stop posthumously baptizing Jews, rededicating itself to an agreement it made seven years ago.

A meeting Tuesday in New York City resulted in a "reaffirmation by the church to eliminate not only Holocaust victims, but all Jews from the IGI (International Genealogical Index), period," said Ernest Michel, chairman of the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

The index, said to include about 600 million names, is used by LDS Church members to perform temple ceremonies during which the faithful offer proxy baptisms on behalf of the dead.

Church leaders requested Tuesday's meeting after several Jewish organizations complained that the LDS faith broke its 1995 promise to keep deceased Jews — including those who died in Nazi concentration camps — from being included in the temple ceremonies, said Michel, who helped engineer the 1995 agreement.

Independent researcher Helen Radkey, who prepared a report for Michel, said research she began in 1999 found that at least 20,000 Jews, and possibly many more, were baptized after death.

Among those she found listed as baptized, she said, was Anne Frank, the Dutch Jewish teenager who died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the spring of 1945. Her diary, scrawled in notebooks during 25 months in hiding before her family was betrayed to the Nazis, made her a heroine of the Holocaust. Her extended family also was listed as being baptized.

The church collects names from government documents and other records worldwide. The names are then used in temple rituals, during which LDS stand-ins are baptized to offer the dead salvation and entry to the LDS religion. It is primarily intended to offer salvation to the ancestors of church members, but many others are included.

Church Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorums of Seventy said removing Holocaust victims and other Jews from the database "is an ongoing, labor-intensive process requiring name-by-name research."

After the 1995 agreement, the church removed 400,000 names of dead Jews, mostly Holocaust victims, from the database. More names are removed each month, Elder Christofferson said.

"When the church is made aware of documented concerns, action is taken in compliance with the agreement," he said.

Radkey is doubtful the church can keep all Jewish names out of the database.

"It is totally unrealistic," she said. "Most Mormons who handle the processing, including deletions of Jewish names from the LDS database, would not know a Jewish name from the back end of a hoe."

Others baptized posthumously by the church, according to Radkey's research, are Ghengis Khan, Joan of Arc, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Buddha.