Mormons. They’re Not Just Violating Our Rights. They’re Targeting Jewish People Too. Who’s Next?
Mormons are so intent on forcing their religion on others they aren’t content with making illegal (or at least very difficult to get) things they disapprove of like alcohol and same-sex marriage. They are engaging in grievous violations against freedom of religion by posthumously baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims despite repeated requests that they stop. They’ve even broken promises they made to stop. So much for honesty and trust.
Ernest “Ernie” Michel has had it. For 14 years, the now 85-year-old Holocaust survivor has been leading a quiet and cordial charge to ensure that victims of Nazi terror aren’t posthumously baptized by members of the LDS Church.
But on Monday, he and other survivors gathered at The Center for Jewish History in New York to publicly denounce what they said is an ongoing practice by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and, in doing so, end discussions. The group came together exactly 70 years after Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass,” a German pogrom during which Nazis ransacked Jewish synagogues, homes and businesses, killed more than 90 Jews and
Jewish representative Ernest Michel, right, meets LDS representative Elder Todd Christofferson during a 2005 meeting with LDS leaders to discuss the LDS ritual of baptism of the dead. (Paul Fraughton/The Salt Lake Tribune) deported up to 30,000 others to concentration camps.
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LDS Church officials, who met with Michel just one week ago, say they are sorry the relationship seems to have ended this way and feel the church’s work and intentions have been misunderstood.
Michel, of New York, is the honorary chair for the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which he said has about 180,000 members.His connection to this issue began as a fluke. He’d seen an article in a Jewish newspaper in the mid-1990s about one Holocaust victim who’d been posthumously baptized by Mormons. So he wrote to then-LDS Church President Howard W. Hunter, seeking an explanation.
He never did hear back from Hunter, but Sen. Orrin Hatch, whom Michel had copied, did respond. In a two-page letter, Hatch explained that this practice was “done out of love for Jewish people,” Michel remembered. “I got that, and then I got suspicious.”
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“My mother and father were killed in the Holocaust for no other reason than they were Jews,” he said earlier. “How can the Mormons victimize them a second time and falsely claim their souls for eternity?”
Over the years, Michel has had many meetings with LDS Church officials, all of them “very pleasant,” he said.
In 1995, he saw progress when the church promised to remove Holocaust victim names from its International Genealogical Index (IGI) and send out on First Presidency letterhead a reminder that proxy baptisms are intended for one’s own ancestors.
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“This has gone on year after year - names given, taken off the list, more names go in. I call it the ‘unstoppable revolving door,’ ” Radkey said from her New York hotel room. “Purging the names isn’t what the Jews want. They want the baptisms to stop.”
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Radkey said hundreds of names, mostly Dutch Holocaust victims, have made the church’s master list in the past few months. Some recently discovered records used to do proxy baptisms even had the words “Auschwitz” or “Polish death camp” on them, she said.
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Respect our religious beliefs! the Mormons cry. Yet they refuse requests to stop forcing their religion on people–even after they’re dead. After spending $20 million on the Yes on 8 campaign and campaigning vociferously to eradicate our marriage rights the Mormons claimed, “We were only defending our deeply held religious beliefs–why are they being targeted?”. How do they not see the irony of legislating their religion on others then crying “persecution!”?
Why should any respect be shown to people (or to their beliefs) when they show not one iota of respect to others or to those people’s beliefs? When they go to such extensive lengths to impose their religion on others they simply go too far. The First Amendment promises Freedom of Religion, and these individuals are violating it in the worst possible way.
At tonight’s vigil my wife held a sign that said We Will Not Submit to a Mormon Divorce on one side. On the side that wasn’t facing the camera the sign said We’re All Mormons Now–Whether We Like It Or Not . And that seems to be their ultimate goal. To make us all Mormons–whether we like it or not.
