Yesterday, the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendents and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced a new agreement to protect the names of Holocaust victims from proxy baptism, bringing to a new resolution a longstanding source of tension between the Mormon and Jewish faith traditions.
Mormon doctrine teaches that everyone who has ever lived must be baptized to achieve salvation and that individuals who did not have the option of baptism during their lives on Earth may be baptized posthumously by proxy in LDS temples.
Members of the LDS Church have been advised to submit only the names of their documented ancestors for proxy baptism. This policy has helped fuel a massive global Mormon genealogy enterprise that has also benefitted causes as diverse as breast cancer research and African-American history.
But it has not stopped some overzealous LDS people from submitting for proxy baptism the names of individuals they cannot claim as relatives—including Holocaust victims.
An act that might have seemed to LDS people deep in the heart of the Book-of-Mormon-belt a gesture of respect for Jews was, of course, an outrage to Jewish people who believe that the names of their deceased relatives should not be inscribed in Mormon records, that Jews are acceptable to God just as they are.
It used to be that LDS Church officials responded to these expressions of concern by explaining in a well-intentioned but sort of pointy-headed theological way that according to Mormon doctrine deceased individuals of course had the option to decline baptism: an explanation that did nothing to assuage the feelings of Jewish people.
But after more than a decade of public controversy (including efforts by the Church to remove the names of Holocaust victims from LDS records, only to have them submitted for baptism by zealous Church members again and again), now that’s changed. New features have been programmed into the computer system that manages millions upon millions of names of deceased individuals submitted for proxy baptism in order to require that Mormons submitting names show direct family lineage and to require them to answer to the Church policy on the Holocaust exemption.
As a Mormon woman married to a Jewish man, I could not be more happy about this acknowledgment of the Shoah and the effort that went into it.
And just in time for new year’s—L’shanah tovah, everyone.
