In February of 2012 Elie Wiesel called on U.S. Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, a Mormon, to get The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes inadvertently called the “Mormon Church”) to stop proxy baptism of Jews. As reported before on this website, leaders of the LDS Church have met many times with Jewish leaders and have found common ground on this controversy. Wiesel, 83, is one of several Jewish leaders who have directly negotiated the issue with the Mormon Church since the mid-1990s.
Early in 2012, reports surfaced that Mormons had baptized the deceased parents of Simon Wiesenthal, the late Holocaust survivor and Nazi-hunter. Wiesel appeared in a church database used to identify potential subjects of baptisms. [1]
The policy of the Church of Jesus Christ for proxy baptisms of people of all faiths is that no one who has died recently should have Mormon temple work done for them without the permission of living relatives. No submission for temple work should be sent in if it will cause offense to anyone who might object. Mormons are not to do temple work for anyone except their own direct ancestors. Mormons should not do temple work for famous people, no matter how moved they are by their life story.
As far as Jews are concerned, Mormons may NOT perform temple work for holocaust victims, and only Jewish converts may submit family names (again, with the consent of the family) to the temple. Even Mormons of Jewish descent should not submit their own family names, if the deceased were holocaust victims. This is the policy of the Church. Whenever names are submitted online, the submitter must read over this policy and consent to it before proceeding.
The church has tried to improve its technology to block the process from including Jewish Holocaust victims. In this case, officials blamed an unidentified person.
“We sincerely regret that the actions of an individual member of the Church led to the inappropriate submission of these names,” spokesman Michael Purdy said in a statement. “These submissions were clearly against the policy of the Church. We consider this a serious breach of our protocol and we have suspended indefinitely this person’s ability to access our genealogy records.”
Mitt Romney holds no formal post in the hierarchy of the Church of Jesus Christ, which has a lay clergy which functions by calling members to temporary service rolls. Therefore, Romney referred the Jewish leaders to the Church.
Official LDS Church Statement on Jewish Genealogy and Temple Work
On February 14, 2012, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued an official statement on the matter. [2]
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe that they may be baptized by proxy for deceased ancestors who never had that opportunity.
The policy of the Church is that members can request these baptisms only for their own ancestors. Proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims are strictly prohibited.
In this case, the Wiesel family names were not submitted for baptisms but simply entered into a genealogical database. Our system would have rejected those names had they been submitted.
In a few instances, names have been submitted in violation of policy. Whether this is done by simple error or for other reasons, the Church considers these submissions to be a serious breach of protocol.
It is distressing when an individual willfully violates the Church’s policy and something that should be understood to be an offering based on love and respect becomes a source of contention. The Church will continue to do all it can to prevent such instances, including denying access to these genealogical records or other privileges to those who abuse them in this way.
Mormons Not Enemies of Jews
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote recently that “Mormons undergoing peaceful rituals in their own temples aren’t on the list” of the “very real, very dangerous enemies” to Judaism.
Jacoby said he accepts the LDS Church’s sincere efforts to clean up the name submission process. He said he is more concerned about the accusation from the Jewish community that “a posthumous ‘baptism’ to which no Jew attaches any credence is tantamount to a second genocide (‘It’s like killing them twice’).”
“What an ugly slander,” he wrote. “Even to the most zealous Mormon, proxy baptism is simply the offering of a choice – it gives non-Mormons in the afterlife a chance to accept the gospel, should they wish to. You don’t have to buy the theology – I certainly don’t – to recognize that its message is benign.”
“By my lights, (Mormon) efforts to make salvation available to millions of deceased strangers were ineffectual,” he continued. “But plainly they were sincere, and intended as a kindness.”
Additional Resources:
LDS Church Toughens its Stand on Proxy Baptisms
The Mormon Who Tried to Save Anne Frank
Basic Mormon Beliefs and Real Mormons