Mormons May Consider 4 Jewish Shooting Victims For Controversial Baptism Rite
Image by Getty Images
(JTA) — The names of four of the Jewish victims of the shootings at a Parkland, Florida high school have reportedly been submitted for proxy baptisms by some members of the Mormon church — a controversial practice that has been frowned upon by the church hierarchy.
The names of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students Jaime Guttenberg, Alyssa Alhadeff, and Alex Schachter, and teacher Scott Beigel, were submitted into the FamilySearch Family Trees database, according to Helen Radkey, a Salt Lake City-based independent researcher who has studied the Mormon practice of posthumous baptisms for two decades.
The website is used by Mormons to trace family lineages and submit requests for proxy baptisms.
The victims names were submitted two days after the February 14 shooting attack that left 17 students and teachers dead. Candidates for the rites must be dead for a year before they can be performed.
The Mormon Church, whose official name is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The church sent a letter to its congregations in March 2012 reiterating the policy that members should only do posthumous baptisms on their own ancestors and forbidding baptisms of Jewish Holocaust victims and celebrities.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Dive In
-
Fast Forward For the first time since Henry VIII created the role, a Jew will helm Hebrew studies at Cambridge
-
Fast Forward Argentine Supreme Court discovers over 80 boxes of forgotten Nazi documents
-
Fast Forward What’s next for suspended student who posted ‘F— the Jews’ video? An alt-right media tour
-
Fast Forward ‘New Jersey tough’: Gov. Phil Murphy on released Hamas hostage Edan Alexander, a Tenafly native
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Ye debuts ‘Heil Hitler’ music video that includes a sample of a Hitler speech
- 2
Opinion It looks like Israel totally underestimated Trump
- 3
Culture Is Pope Leo Jewish? Ask his distant cousins — like me
- 4
Fast Forward Student suspended for ‘F— the Jews’ video defends himself on antisemitic podcast
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward For the first time since Henry VIII created the role, a Jew will helm Hebrew studies at Cambridge
-
Fast Forward Argentine Supreme Court discovers over 80 boxes of forgotten Nazi documents
-
News In Edan Alexander’s hometown in New Jersey, months of fear and anguish give way to joy and relief
-
Fast Forward What’s next for suspended student who posted ‘F— the Jews’ video? An alt-right media tour
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.