The long-simmering dispute between Jewish leaders, particularly the children of Holocaust survivors, and the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) is boiling over. And as is often the case, the issue at hand is not really the problem. It's merely the battleground being used by each side to pursue a whole other agenda. That is probably why the two groups are talking past each other, with neither side getting any satisfaction.
In case you didn't know, LDS has a standing practice of performing posthumous conversions. That's right; they convert people after they have died. Basically it boils down to their desire to keep families together in the after-life.
Mormons believe that when they die they will be reunited with family members who were faithful Mormons. Thus, church members have a solemn obligation to identify the deceased -- especially those who weren't Mormons -- and baptize them by proxy to give them the option of accepting Christ and becoming Mormon in the afterlife.
Not surprisingly, the children of people who died because they were Jews find this especially offensive. There is a particularly bitter irony to this practice given that during the Holocaust, living Jews were not able to convert out of the Jewish faith in order to save their own lives, even if they wanted to.
So the Mormon's practice is a kind of twisted double whammy, which offers the wrong solution to a problem that doesn't even exist. But that is not how church leaders see it at all. They think that they are doing these souls a favor, making what they call a "freewill offering" which "should not be a source of friction to anyone". Are they kidding?
It's not that I doubt the sincerity of the LDS leadership, but it's hard to understand how they miss the implication of what they are doing or why it might be deeply painful to the families of those whom they have converted. It's hard to understand how they miss the perceived ugliness of anything that even smacks of forced conversion, especially for people who have been forcibly converted or died resisting such efforts for two thousand years.
So why do they keep at it? Are they that mean-spirited? I don't think so. They look so clean cut and speak so nicely when they offer their faith in the world. So what's really going on?