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Apparently some French newspaper has been claiming that we’ve been dipping microfilm with lists of names of dead people. I heard this in HT yesterday. Either it’s an urban legend about the paper, or an urban legend about the microfilm. When I saw the topic title, I was really curious how you were going to combine French Press and Baptisms for the Dead. But I had this French Press in mind: You should put the microfilm dipping strategy in the suggestion box at the temple. Might be a great way to increase efficiency by large multiples! I guess I shouldn’t really know what a french press device is, if I were a proper Mormon…
Ah, okay, we call those “cafetieres” here, so didn’t get the reference. This came up in HT. I suggested we should get some kind of small submarine to do the job… and was told I was chasing the spirit out. The only thing was that her husband had mentioned the microfilm thing.
Brian Johnston wrote:When I saw the topic title, I was really curious how you were going to combine French Press and Baptisms for the Dead. But I had this French Press in mind:
You should put the microfilm dipping strategy in the suggestion box at the temple. Might be a great way to increase efficiency by large multiples! I guess I shouldn’t really know what a french press device is, if I were a proper Mormon…
my thought exactly…And in the American press (Salt Lake Tribune) we have … Quote:An LDS Church member last month posthumously baptized the parents of Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor and Jewish rights advocate, and the Los Angeles center named for him is incensed.
“We are outraged that such insensitive actions continue in the Mormon temples,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Wiesenthal Center’s associate dean, said in a statement on the group’s website. “Such actions make a mockery of the many meetings with the top leadership of the Mormon church.”
LDS officials in Salt Lake City were quick to apologize Monday, saying that the Utah-based faith “sincerely regret
that the actions of an individual member … led to the inappropriate submission of these names,” which were “clearly against the policy of the church.”“We consider this a serious breach of our protocol,” spokesman Scott Trotter said in a statement, “and we have suspended indefinitely this person’s ability to access our genealogy records.”
Gary Mokotoff, a Jewish genealogist in New Jersey who has been using the church’s massive records collection for decades, is cautiously optimistic about the religion’s response. In fact, he was told in writing that the church also suspended access for the culprit’s wife.
“If the entire Mormon population finally understands that you will be reprimanded for violating church policies,” Mokotoff said in a phone interview, “then it will be effective.”Mokotoff alerted his peers in 1992 about the LDS practice known as “baptism for the dead” in which living people stand in for the deceased to offer that person a chance to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the hereafter. Mormons believe it is their moral obligation to do the temple rituals, while those on the other side can choose whether to accept the action or not.
The proxy baptism practice was deeply offensive to many Jews, who had suffered so greatly for their faith. So Mokotoff, then president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, tried to persuade the LDS Church to remove the names of Holocaust victims from its International Genealogical Index.
I like the Church’s response in this situation, since there was an agreement in place not to baptize Holocaust victims and survivors. There needs to be teeth to the policy, since an unenforced policy is not really a policy at all. (which means there are some “policies” that really aren’t policies – and I’m fine with that, as well) Stupid question, how do non-members know that Simon Wiesenthal’s parents were baptised? well what does one do IF you are a Mormon AND you are an ancestor of a holocaust survivor and you want to do temple work for your holocaust survivor ancestor ? shouldn’t that be addressed too ? heck – don’t you think a relative should have a natural right to do temple work for his ancestor ? wouldn’t it be natural to assume that a descendant’s rights supercede that of a religious sects wishes ? definitely something to think about !
That almost certainly has occurred. Although the church has backed off trying to convert Jews, and withdrew the Hebrew BoM.
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