Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2009] LDS’S POSTHUMOUS BAPTISMS 285
that arose from LDS’ activities in this arena, which came face-to-face with
Jewish revulsion toward baptism of any kind. Accepting the responsibility
of representing the Jewish Community in the negotiations was Ernest
Michel, previously identified as Chairman of the American Gathering of
Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
Yet, following the joint agreement, Mormons accelerated their posthumous
baptismal activities. Names that previously had been removed from
the IGI as a part of the agreement reappeared in the same database from
which they had been removed, while other Holocaust victims who had initially
escaped the baptismal process were now being baptized in large
numbers.
The 1995 agreement has been violated repeatedly, acts that continue to
this day, and with no end in sight. When those debasements were brought to
LDS’s attention, the Mormon authorities suggested, as one possible reason
for the violations, that overzealous Church members were doing name submissions
in defiance of the formal agreement. 8 In this respect, Mormon
forced posthumous baptism of the dead and Catholic forced baptism of the
living have a similar administrative flaw: i.e., while three Papal bulls dating
from 1217, 1365, and 1727 stated explicitly that no party should be baptized
against their will, no mechanism existed to undo a forced baptism
even when it contravened the theological authority that forbade it. In effect,
in both Catholic and Mormon theology, the waters of baptism cannot be
washed away even when the ritual was performed in violation of Church
doctrine.
Today, Holocaust victims from Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
France, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova,
Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine are subjected to forced
posthumous baptism, along with the seven hundred Roman Jews taken from
Rome, sent to Auschwitz in October 1944, and posthumously baptized in
May 1999. 9 The names of the baptized are most often taken from public and
private databases, such as Yiskor books, published family genealogies,
internment records kept by the Nazis, and governmental vital records, with
a special emphasis on marriage records where both the bride’s and the
Hirsch Altusky of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization; and Roman Kent of
the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
8. Remarks about overzealous Mormons were offered by LDS only as a possible
explanation for the situation, and do not constitute either a formal or even necessarily
accurate Church statement on the matter.
9. In November 2006, Salt Lake City researcher Helen Radkey, who
researches Mormon violations of their own rules, discovered more than 700 records
in the IGI that documented the 1999 posthumous baptisms for the Jews of Rome,
all of whom were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in October 1943.