You people are looking more for the traditions of your fathers, who killed the prophets, then your own relationship with God. And denying Jesus, you deny God. You have never even known Him, who you say you worship. whitewashed gravestones.

Exactly WHY should a Mormon adopt Jewish values? I forget. When you go to his house and proselytize him, please ask him?

@rachel

The Mormons stopped doing that years ago and apologized for it.

So, unless you have some evidence for your claim that “Mormons make a practice of baptizing Jews after death in order to save them”, you may wish to apologize before next Yom Kippur — to us, to Sen. Hatch and the Mormon Church.

@arielle

Exactly what makes this an “awful” and “drecky” song? The lyrics? The melody? The performance? Please be specific. I’m not arguing – I just don’t understand.

@Drew Nealski

1) Exactly why is the song “terrible”? The lyrics? The melody? The performance? Please be specific. I’m not arguing – I just don’t understand.

2) In what way, exactly, is this song “the worst sort of political pandering”? Who exactly is he pandering to – the 3000 Jewish voters of Utah? The Jewish voters in the Senate? What makes you say that? Where is that coming from?

ITs our hearts upon which need to be circumsized, and in private, even a closet. but without denying publically the existance of Him as the Messiah of the World. obviously.

Thank you. Love you very much, my brothers and cousins. okay.

I hope that Jews of modern day can accept him and go against the Traditions of hating Jesus… it doesnt mean to abandon your culture. It means to accept Excelsius.

Especially considering that the King of the whole entire world, even the Universe, was born Jewish, the chosen people of God, of the house of David through his mother, and adopted father, and for that reason, when he comes back,
*yes, he is alive, and the first to be so after death* He will sit on his throne in Jerusalem, and the entire world will adore and worship him there. What other man would be accepted of the Jews as the world leader, without any gentile being able to contradict it. Name on. Jesus is a huge honor and blessing not only to the world, but his own Jewish people.

Thank you.

I, like Senator hatch, often feel sorry myself that i was not born Jewish.

What seems like political grandstanding to you is the real deal: the guy remembers the birthdays of hundreds of people he genuinely admires – and sends them flowers. People who have no semblance of any kind of influence in the world at all. Insignificant people like my kid. The guy is just genuinely nice. But we can’t believe in that, can we?

And he votes his conscience. It’s not a political thing. And you can agree with him or not – it’s a free country because of people like him. People who care about other people and do their best to try to do what’s right. If he fails at this, he fails – but he’s trying to make nice because he really is nice. Laugh at that. How sad for you. I wish I was nice like that.

I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My mother is a Japanese convert to the LDS Church from the Russian Orthodoxy of her family in Japan. In the direct line of my grandfathers in Sweden is a Jew named Abraham who died about 1650. I can assure you that he, along with other ancestors who were Lutheran during their lifetimes, was baptized vicariously by his Mormon descendants. Whether it makes a difference to him depends on (a) whether you believe that he continues to live as a spirit after death and (b) whether, as a spirit, he has decided to accept belief in Jesus as the Messiah, and in the specific authority of the LDS Church as agent of Messiah, as his descendants did in 1896.

Regardless, it may interest you to know that Mormons do NOT believe that a Jew who lived as a just and good person will “go to hell” or suffer any kind of eternal punishment for failure to accept Jesus as the Messiah, in contrast to many other Christian denominations. On the other hand, there are many Christians in the Catholic and Protestant churches who believe in various rationales that a person who died as a Jew can still be “saved” from eternal damnation, in some cases by his spirit accepting Jesus as the Messiah after death, but without the need for baptism, vicarious or otherwise. In other words, there are many Christian churches who believe that my ancestor Abraham may be “saved” as a Jew who has accepted Jesus as Christ, even though they don’t do anything here on earth to specifically assist him in doing so.

Do Jews condemn Christians who believe in such post-mortal evangelism? I have not seen any such condemnations. The only difference from Mormon Christians is that Mormons have themselves baptized on behalf of their dead ancestors (such as my Japanese ancestor Kawai Bunzaburo, who died as a Russian Orthodox member), in order to give those ancestors the choice of accepting Jesus as Messiah or not. If you don’t think Mormons have any special authority from God to do such ordinances, then the ordinances are totally ineffective, and there is no reason to be upset about them. They have no more effect than the prayers of Christians who hope that deceased Jews will accept Jesus as Christ after death, or the belief of other Christians (which Mormons disagree with) that deceased Jews are condemned to eternal torment in Hell. If you don’t accept Jesus as the Messiah, nothing a Christian says or does or prays about to God can affect the eternal condition of your soul or that of your ancestors, whether the Christian thinks your ancestor is in Hell or Heaven.

If you are not interested in the theological issues I have discussed, and your only concern is that you think it is disrespectful to YOU when a Mormon is baptized on behalf of his own Jewish ancestor, then you should reconsider your attitude that you somehow have a superior claim on the deceased than his own descendants have. Mormons don’t research through old archives of birth and death records in order to irritate you. They are looking for their own ancestors, in order to incorporate them into their own eternal family. If you want respect from Mormons for your own belief, perhaps you need to respect their beliefs as well, as articles of faith that are sincere and motivated by goodwill and love for G-d and neighbor.

If it drives you crazy to think that somebody somewhere does not accept your religious beliefs (or political opinions), then you are never going to be able to live peacefully with the diversity of people in the world, most of whom disagree with your own religion (which is true for every person on earth). That is called religious intolerance, and it was practiced by Jews and by Christians and by Muslims at various places when they had the political power to coerce membership in state religions (such as Judea under the Hasmonean dynasty when it conquered its Idumean neighbors, and Catholics in 1492 Spain, and Puritans in early New England, and Muslims under the Taliban). On the other hand, if you are confident enough in your own beliefs that you can allow people who disagree with you about religion to live in peace, then welcome to the pluralistic society called America.

I am saddened that there has been so much hurt caused over the baptisms performed posthumously for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. I can understand that some Jewish people feel hurt because the memories of their loved ones have been misused. Like others have said though, no harm was meant. I know this to be a fact. I happened to know the woman who started all the problem with baptizing for Jews who have died.

I met Wilma in 1990 when she was in her 80′s. She had had a hard life, and had one great joy in her life–she love Jesus Christ and what He had done for her. She felt the Jews had also had a hard life, and she wished to share what she had with those who had already passed away. One day, when I was talking with her (abt 1990), she told me what she had been doing. On her own, she had gone to the library and sought out the names of hundreds (and probably even thousands) of Jews in hopes of giving their spirits comfort. She had been doing this for several years as a quiet gift to them.

I, on the other hand, was greatly concerned. Not because somebody might find out, but because her practice went against Church policy; no one is to do temple work for those they are not closely linked to. I felt that she was taking upon her something that was not hers to give.
Anyway, I moved shortly after this and I lost touch with Wilma, but I know that she was not acting under the direction of the LDS Church in any capacity, nor was she doing anything to purposely harm anyone. From what I could tell, she seemed genuinely pleased with the gift she was giving.

As an aside, I am grateful my children’s Jewish grandparents, are open minded enough to accept my children without resentment for slights that have been unintentionally caused by members of my church. I am grateful for generous minded people.

I also would like to say that our faith contains the utmost respect for others, maybe even especially Jewish people. I’ve had personal interaction with Senator Hatch, and while he may think a little highly of himself (and, I think, be wrong more often than he is right politically), he is nothing but sincere in (a) his respect and admiration for others, and (b) his desire to do what he believes is right . Happy Hanukkah!

From where I stand politician most of they time do something nice in return for something else. At least that is the way I see it.

How can one reject getting baptized into your church when they are already dead? This makes no sense.

The LDS church has urged members to submit the names of only their own ancestors for ordinances, and to request permission of surviving family members of people who have died within the past 75 years, and has enforced these guidelines to the best of its abilities, erasing hundreds of thousands of improperly submitted names.[17] Latter-day Saint apostle Boyd K. Packer has stated the LDS Church is clear that it uses the public records it collects for temple ordinance work.[18]

Despite the guidelines, some members of the Church have submitted the names of Holocaust victims, and prominent Nazis, such as Heinrich Himmler, for vicarious baptism without adequate permission. In December 2002, independent researcher Helen Radkey published a report showing that, following a 1995 promise from the church to remove Jewish Nazi victims from its International Genealogical Index, the Church’s database included the names of about 19,000 who had a 40 to 50 percent chance “to be Holocaust victims … in Russia, Poland, France, and Austria.”[19][20] Genealogist Bernard Kouchel conducted a search of the International Genealogical Index, and discovered that many well known Jews had been vicariously baptized, including Maimonides, Albert Einstein, and Irving Berlin, without family permission.

Church official D. Todd Christofferson told the New York Times that the church expends massive amounts of resources attempting to purge improperly submitted names, but that it is not feasible to expect the Church to find each and every last one, and that the agreement in 1995 did not place this type of responsibility on the centralized church leadership.[21]

Jewish groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center spoke out against the vicarious baptism of Holocaust perpetrators and victims in the mid-1990s and again in the 2000s when they discovered the practice, which they consider insensitive to the living and the dead, was continuing.[22] The associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Abraham Cooper, complained that infamous figures such as Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun appeared on LDS genealogical records: “Whether official or not, the fact remains that this is exactly the kind of activity that enraged and hurt, really, so many victims of the Holocaust and caused alarm in the Jewish community.”[23][24]

In 2008, the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, announced that, since the Church had repeatedly violated previous agreements, it would no longer negotiate with the Church to try to prevent vicarious baptism.[25] Michel called the practice a revision of history that plays into the hands of Holocaust deniers, stating: “They tell me, that my parents’ Jewishness has not been altered but … 100 years from now, how will they be able to guarantee that my mother and father of blessed memory who lived as Jews and were slaughtered by Hitler for no other reason than they were Jews, will someday not be identified as Mormon victims of the Holocaust?”[26]

Church officials, in response, stated that the Church does not teach that vicarious baptisms coerce deceased persons to become Mormons, nor does the Church add those names to its list of Church members.[27][28] Church officials have also stated that, in accordance with the 1995 agreement, it has removed more than 300,000 names of Jewish Holocaust victims from its databases, as well as subsequently removing names later identified by Jewish groups. Church officials have also stated that a new version of the database, New FamilySearch, has been developed and is currently being implemented that would help prevent the submission of Holocaust victim names for temple ordinances.[29]
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Mormon baptisms for the dead are performed by members of the mormon faith as proxy for those who have died. Although Mormons would not likely object to any efforts by Jews to perform a bris for deceased Mormons, you would surely have a hard time finding willing and suitable proxies…

As a Mormon, I would not mind this and honestly believe I know of very few Mormons who would condemn it in any way as an act of love. However, given that so many Jews have died because they were Jewish, if Jews take offense of our attempt to show love in our own way, we should discontinue and try to show our love in a different way. I think Senator Hatch is sincere in his attempt to show affection for the Jewish people in a different way.