Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, said Monday that talks are over with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, adding that the church has repeatedly violated a 13-year-old agreement barring the practice. The church denies the charge.
The 1995 agreement says the church will not perform baptisms or other rites for Holocaust victims, except in the very rare instances when they have living descendants who are Mormon. The practice allows faithful Mormons to have their ancestors baptized into the 178-year-old church, which they believe reunites families in the afterlife. Jews are particularly offended by baptisms of Holocaust victims because they were murdered specifically because of their religion.
Church spokesman Mike Otterson said the church has kept its part of the agreement by removing more than 200,000 names from its genealogical index. But researcher Helen Radkey said that since 2005, she has seen and recorded a sampling of several thousand entries that indicate Mormon religious rites, including baptisms, had been conducted for these Holocaust victims, some as recently as July.