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Mormons baptize Jews murdered in Holocaust

by | 20th, February 2012

DID you know that Mormons baptize Jews murdered in the holocaust? The victims of Nazi genocide don’t even get to own their souls. They get nothing. Mormons took it upon themselves to baptize Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel asked Mormon Mitt Romney to investigate why this happens. (Rumours abound that Romney’s theist father-in-law Edward Davies was posthumously baptized.)

Forrest Wickman explains

The church says it learned that such baptisms were occurring in 1991 and formally ordered a stop to them; when it received complaints from an organization of Holocaust survivors in 1995, it re-emphasized the directive and removed hundreds of thousands of names from genealogical records. Even so, members have disregarded the order again and again. … Mormons think of baptisms for the dead as a service to others, almost like adding family members’ names to a guest list. According to Mormon doctrine, dead people who are baptized by proxy don’t automatically join the church. Instead, they have the right to accept or reject the ordinance in the afterlife, and thus the chance to ascend to the highest levels in the afterlife, depending on what they decide.

How generous of them.

Lawrence Wright reports how it works:

In practice, teenagers line up in the temple to be baptized as proxies for dead people whose names appear on a computer screen. “We also have people who are called ‘extraction missionaries,’ Elbert Peck, the former editor and publisher of the Mormon intellectual magazine Sunstone, told me. “They basically go to their little stake center and sit down at a microfilm machine and take these names and put them into our computer database.” According to Richard E. Turley, Jr., the managing director of the Family and Church History Department, in Salt Lake City, as many as two hundred million dead people have been baptized as Mormons, including Buddha and all the popes, Shakespeare, Einstein, and Elvis Presley—what Peck dismissively calls “celebrity work for the dead.”

How did the story emerge? Gary Mokotoff wrote in 1995:

In June 1992, I was assisting a member of the Dutch Jewish Genealogical Society in locating information about family members with the surname “Caneel” using the facilities of the LDS (Mormon) Family History Library in Salt Lake City. As a final check, I searched the IGI section that included Netherlands for the name Caneel. Although the IGI has very little information about Jews because it is primarily a list of some 200 million ancestors of Mormons who have been baptized into the faith, I noticed a number of persons named Caneel, and some had distinctly Jewish given names.

Information in the IGI can be traced to its source, and I determined that the source was a book located in the Family History Library entitled Lijst van Nederlandee jooden die gestorven zijn gedurende de tweede wereld oorlog (List of Dutch Jews, prisoners and missing people that have died in concentration camps during World War II). Spot checking a few other names from the Dutch book, it was clear that other names had been extracted and other Jews had been baptized. The source information in the IGI also revealed that the extraction was not the act of individuals but a planned program of the Mormon Church. I also checked to see if Anne Frank was among the baptized but could not find her name. (In truth, I later discovered that Anne Frank had been baptized; I was looking in the Dutch section of the IGI–Anne Frank was German.)

And:

On May 3, 1995, a landmark agreement was signed by representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) and members of the Jewish community that ended the practice of Mormons posthumously baptizing Jews who were not direct ancestors of Mormons.

But they carried on doing it. Because, like the Nazis, Mormons know what’s best for Jews…



Posted: 20th, February 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink