The Boston Globe

Opinion

Opinion | Jeff Jacoby

Mormon ritual is no threat to Jews

A woman phoned me several years ago, wanting to add the names of my father’s massacred relatives who had been killed in Auschwitz to the Mormon Church’s vast genealogical archives. I told her that I certainly had no objection. At the time I knew nothing about “baptism by proxy,’’ the ritual that Mormons believe gives even souls in the afterlife a chance to accept their faith and thus enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only later did I learn that some Mormons, eager to save the souls of dead Jews, had taken to submitting the names of Holocaust victims for posthumous baptism. The discovery didn’t trouble me at all.

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