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Latter-day Saint Temples/Work for Holocaust victims
Revision as of 20:51, 1 June 2006 by DavidFerguson (talk | contribs) (I'll finish the rest of it when I get the source for the conference talk I asked about on the elist)
Contents
Criticism
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has done and continues to carry out proxy baptisms (baptizing for the dead) for Jewish Holocaust victims. These baptisms continue to be performed in spite of continual requests from the Jewish community to end the practice and remove all Jewish Holocaust names from the Church's geneological records used for posthumous baptisms.
Response
History
In 1995 an agreement was signed between the Church and leading Jewish authorities which officially ended baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims after it was found that that there was a substantial number of Holocaust victims in the Church's temple records as having been baptized.
Controversy over the matter sparked up again in 2002 when it was found that there was still thousands of names of Holocaust victims in the Church's records. The Church responded by re-enforcing it's policy which required members to only perform proxy baptisms for their traceable ancestors, and established a committee with Jewish leaders to investigate why there were still names of Holocaust victims in the database.
Controversy over the subject again came up in 2006 when it was discovered that there were still many Holocaust victims' names in the database.
Mistakes in the database
Conclusion
While work toward the complete removal of all Holocaust victims' names from the Church's database continues, controversy and frustration will undoubtedly continue to surface. It is important to remember that progress is in fact being made and that eventually this conflict will slip into non-existence.
Sources
- SAM SER. April 15, 2005. Jews and Mormons tackle 'proxy baptism' controversy. Huge numbers of Holocaust victims are in church's baptism database. Jerusalem Post, Online Edition. http://tinyurl.com/n2n4q. accessed June 01, 2006.
Further reading
FAIR wiki articles
- Links to related articles in the wiki
FAIR web site
- Links to articles on the FAIR web site; Topical Guide entries go first
External links
- Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin, "Reflections on the Holocaust”
Printed material
- Printed resources whose text is not available online