An ethnic group which has done public battle with the LDS Church is Judaism. According to Richard and Joan Ostling, in the mid-1990s about 380,000 deceased Jews had proxy baptisms performed in their names in various LDS temples. They included many Jews who died in Nazi concentration camps including Anne Frank; Sigmund Freud, David Ben-Gurion and Ba”‘al Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic Jewish movement. Adding insult to injury, zealous Mormons also stood in proxy for Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, believing they effected their baptisms and sealings to one another as husband and wife for eternity.
If the prospect of meeting Hitler as a god in eternity rankles the sensitivities of most non-Mormons, imagine the impact of such an idea on a Jew. While they, like many Christians, would put little credence in the eternal effect of such temple ordinances, the idea of proxy Mormonism is reprehensible to them, as voiced by Aaron Breitbart, senior researcher for the Simon Weisenthal Center based in Los Angeles, “. . .[t]hese people were born Jews, they lived as Jews and many of them died because they were Jews. . .They would not have chosen to be baptized Mormons in life, and there is no reason they would want to be baptized by proxy in death.”
In 1995 the LDS Church agreed to remove all such names from their databases and to stop baptizing any deceased Jew unless he or she is an ancestor of a living Mormon, or, alternately, the Church had obtained written permission from all living members of the Jew”‘s family. Researcher Helen Radkey estimates, however, that over a million Jews have had proxy temple ordinances performed after the agreement of the LDS Church to cease performing vicarious baptisms for Jews.
For more information, see The Mormon Mirage 3rd Edition: A Former Member Looks at the Mormon Church Today (Zondervan, 2009). Also available as an audiobook and as an expanded-text E-book for Nook, Kindle and other reading devices.
