Richard Ostling

This practice [baptism for the dead] is especially offensive to Jews. A highly sensitive vicarious baptism issue erupted publicly in the mid‑1990s when baptism for Jewish victims of the Holocaust — some 380,000 of them — created an angry backlash from the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. The names had all been submitted by nine zealous Mormons who had visited concentration camps and Holocaust museums in Europe. The situation surfaced when Ernest Michel, a founding member of the survivors' organization, discovered in the genealogical library that his parents, both of whom died at Auschwitz, had been given Mormon baptisms. In 1995, after a year of negotiations, the church agreed to remove all such names and to refrain from baptizing deceased Jews unless they were ancestors of living LDS Church members or the church had written permission from all living members of the person's family.