Anne Frank ‘Baptized’ by Mormons After Death

By JTA February 22, 2012

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.

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