Anne Frank ‘Baptized’ by Mormons After Death
Anne Frank was baptized in a Mormon proxy ritual, at least the third Holocaust victim discovered to have been baptized posthumously this month.
The ceremony reportedly took place last weekend in a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple in the Dominican Republic. It was discovered by Helen Radkey, a former member of the Mormon church, who has become a whistleblower on such activity.
Only Mormons have access to the church’s genealogy database which can also be used to submit a deceased person’s name for proxy baptism.
The discovery comes more than a week after it was discovered that the parents of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal were posthumously baptized last month. Wiesenthal was a Holocaust survivor who died in 2005; his mother was killed in the Nazi death camp Belzec in 1942.
Posthumous baptism, which is done by proxy, is also known as “baptism for the dead.” It allows members of the church to stand in for the deceased to offer them a chance to join the church in the afterlife.
In 2010, the church agreed after meetings with Jewish leaders to halt the proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims unless the names were submitted by their direct ancestors.
Anne Frank was posthumously baptized at least a dozen times between 1989 and 1999, Radkey told the Huffington Post.
Also last week, the names of the father and grandfather of Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel were found to have been submitted for proxy baptism.
In an interview with the Huffington Post, Wiesel called on Mitt Romney, the front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nod, to tell his church to stop performing posthumous proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
