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April 15, 2005/Nisan 6 5765, Volume 57, No. 33
Mormons renew pledge to stop posthumously baptizing Jews
CHANAN TIGAY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - A delegation of five Jews and leaders of the Mormon Church and historians met in Salt Lake City April 10-11, and agreed to form a committee to explore issues related to proxy baptisms - the Mormon practice of posthumously baptizing non-Mormons, including Holocaust victims and other Jews.
"We walked in assuming that we were going to be embattled and walked out realizing that we were on the same side of the table," said David Elcott, U.S. director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee.
While members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints view proxy baptisms as a gift, it has proven hard for many Jews to swallow, especially when applied to Jews murdered in the Holocaust, among them Anne Frank.
Participants at the April 11 meeting said they agreed to convene the committee by June 1. At the same time, the church recommitted itself to putting a stop to baptizing dead Jews, except if they were related to Mormons.
In 1995, church leaders agreed to halt the proxy baptisms of Jews, but Ernest Michel, chairman of the New York-based World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and a member of the Jewish delegation, said he and his group had documentation proving the ceremonies had continued, possibly as recently as this year.
"According to our information they have not lived up to that agreement," he said.
In the new agreement, the church agreed not to list the names of Holocaust victims in its databases, and the recently created Yad Vashem database, which holds the names of 3 million Holocaust victims, will not be mined and posted on Mormon databases, Michel said.
In proxy baptisms, living members of the Mormon Church are immersed in water and baptized as stand-ins for dead people.
According to Mormon practice, the faithful are only to proxy baptize their own dead relatives. According to the new agreement, Mormons with dead Jewish relatives may continue to baptize them.
"We continue to emphasize to our members that their focus should be on only those who are their own ancestors," D. Todd Christofferson, a member of the church's Presidency of the Seventy and a member of the Mormon contingent at the meeting, told JTA.
"There are some of our current members who have Jewish ancestors and I think we're all in agreement that it's quite appropriate that they would fulfill that religious obligation," he continued. "But those who do not have Jewish ancestors should not be forwarding names of deceased Jews."
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