By Morris Malakoff, JTNews Correspondent
The collision of one of the western world’s oldest religions — Judaism — with one of its newest — Mormonism — is leaving a lot of individuals in both faiths confused and hurt.
For the average person, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly recognized as “Mormons,” are most visible through the clean-cut, young male missionaries that come to their front door dressed in matching black suits and white shirts.
Those with an interest in genealogy also know the LDS church for its extensive and highly organized cataloging of records of births, deaths, censuses and immigration records that allow people of all faiths to easily research their ancestry. It is that ancestry effort that has caused heartache and anger between the two faiths.
At a meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Washington State on Feb. 11, Bob Mullen, director of the Bellevue Family History Center, a resource center for records that have been gathered by the LDS church, presented a nuts-and-bolts discussion of how anyone, but specifically Jewish individuals researching family history, could use the modern Internet-based records system the church has built. He also explained how records were gathered by teams of people who had fanned out across the world, particularly to Europe, to scour public and church records to add to the data that is collated at church headquarters in Salt Lake City. In fact, he pointed out that the church now recruits retired individuals to do this work in 18-month stints and labels them as missionaries, much like their considerably younger counterparts.
After the presentation, he was asked about the reasons that the church has so assiduously been gathering records, particularly since early in the 20th century, given that most faiths more readily tout efforts at eradicating poverty or attempting to ease the multitude of other societal ills.
He said that while the young missionaries sought to baptize the living, the older missionaries sought to baptize the dead. He pointed to an LDS dogma of “baptism for the dead.”
Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of Mormonism, claimed to have received a “revelation” from God on January 19, 1841, which revealed that the practice of “baptisms for your dead” was “instituted before the foundation of the world.”
That scripture from the Book of Mormon laid the foundation for an effort that would allow for contemporary church members to get ancestors baptized into the faith so that in the LDS vision of the afterlife, all members of a family could be together in the “celestial kingdom.” Entrance to that kingdom is allowed only by believers — those baptized in a ceremony in a temple.
That was acceptable for Jews until the mid 1990s, when it was discovered that more than a quarter million Jews had been baptized in this way, many of them from the rolls of Holocaust victims that the bureaucracy of the Third Reich had left intact in the ashes of World War II.
Given the painful history of Jews forced to convert away from their faith in life through the ages, many found this likely well-meant gesture to be an affront and an insult, no matter the overriding intent.
On Saturday, Feb. 16, Mark Paredes, an LDS member who serves as director of the Latino Outreach for the American Jewish Congress in Los Angeles, spoke at a “fireside chat” at an LDS stake in Renton. His topic was the relationship between Jews, the state of Israel, and the LDS Church.
Paredes is uniquely qualified to comment, as he has worked as a press liaison for the Israeli Consulate General in Los Angeles and served as a U.S. foreign service officer at the embassy in Israel.
After addressing the commonalities the LDS church sees between the two religions, including the belief that Mormons are one of the lost tribes, he addressed the issue of post-life baptism, particularly in the case of Jews and Holocaust victims.
After clarifying that he was not speaking for the AJCongress, but as a member of the LDS church, he explained that the church rules make it clear that a person who adds a name to the baptism rolls must be able to prove that they are related, hence the massive genealogical effort. He acknowledged that while there have been problems, those problems are not the result of a church-designed conspiracy to convert Jews posthumously.
“That list of names that was discovered in the 1990s was submitted by nine individuals,” he said. “Just nine people out of 13 million Mormons were responsible for what happened.”
But the actions of those nine resulted in a high level negotiation between Jewish and LDS leaders brokered by U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. According to both Paredes and a story in the Jewish Daily Forward in May of 2007, that negotiation resulted in the removal of those names from post-death baptismal rolls. But names of Jews continue to make their way onto the rolls, meaning more negotiations and more angst. A complaint by the Wiesenthal Center last year resulted in another round of meetings, which have yet to completely resolve the issue.
“There are measures being put into place to stop this from happening,” said Paredes. “Shortly, LDS members will have to provide their membership numbers in order to add a name to the rolls, eliminating people using false identities to do that,” he said.
As for those still on the rolls, Paredes said that it takes a lot of investigation to remove someone. The name of Albert Einstein is still there, for instance.
“We need to determine if someone who is Jewish might actually have a Mormon relative who could prove the lineage,” he said. “In that case, they are legitimately on the rolls. It is entirely possible that Einstein has a distant relative who is now a member of the church.”
But Schelly Talalay Dardashti, a renowned blogger and speaker on Jewish genealogy who regularly writes on the subject of Mormons and Jews, told JTNews when she visited Seattle last summer that the posthumous conversion of Jews “creates fraudulent records.”
“If it’s in the [International Genealogical Index], and your kids or your grandchildren look and they find your name in there, they’re going to say, ‘Zaida was a Mormon?’” she said. “If they don’t know the story, it’s fraudulent.”
Paredes points out that being baptized does not make someone retroactively a member of the LDS church.
“It only opens the way for them to join in the Celestial Kingdom,” he said. “They will be asked and they can refuse. They also would be denied if they were a bad person in their terrestrial life, but that is a judgment only God can make.”
Still, there is distrust and suspicion from Jewish ranks.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, told the Forward that “the Wiesenthal Center is deeply disappointed that the Church has not done nearly enough to… stop the posthumous baptism of Jews.”