I am the one who did the temple work for Ann Frank. (Her given name is Annelies Marie Frank. The dates matched exactly to her. I looked it up when I got home from the temple.) It was back in the 80's when I was living in Salt Lake and was still extremely active. When they first handed me the name slip & I saw who's name was on there, I wanted to stand up and shout "No! Honestly! Ann Frank DIED for her religion". But the active, straight arrow inside of me said :Don't cause a scene. Just do it & if Ann doesn't want it, or if she does want it, the choice is hers.
If you absolutely didn't want anything to do with this, Ann...Pleaz forgive me.

As a Jew (and I think I am speaking for a very great percentage of Jews, and perhaps all Jews everywhere), this is no fault of yours---nor would you be blamed for this by any Jew I am aware of (even the most exceptionally frumiest).

Jews (across the Jewish spectrum, from the most liberal to the most conservative) have a TREMENDOUS problem with LDSCorp putting you, and all other Mormons who have been in your place, in that unfairly-pressured position.

For me, baptizing deceased Holocaust victims into Mormonism feels like "kidnapping" and a "second death." The feeling is: it wasn't enough that "you" (the plural "yous" who were involved in the WWII killings) murdered our bodies, now "you" (Mormonism as an institution, right now) are attempting to "kill" our Jewish souls by negating our Jewishness---solely for your own selfish, and self-centered, institutional ends.

Any Jew I know, or know of (even those I most intensely disagree with on most other issues), would throw an arm around your shoulders and say: "It's okay...it wasn't your fault...and thank you so very, very much for caring."

It wasn't your fault.

You had no viable choice...the Mormon Church required you to do as you did.

If you are ever in Amsterdam, please go to Anne Frank's house and feel the vibes there. (Although you can actually feel the fear of those who lived there, you can also feel the good feelings, too---and there are more good feelings there than I think most people would predict.) For me, and although I knew what I was going to see from prior reading, it was seeing with my own eyes the photos Anne had cut from movie magazines and pasted to the walls: film stars of that era, and particularly the one of Shirley Temple, which really affected me since the two girls were close to each other in age. If you are ever able to visit, I am sure you will, afterwards, feel a whole lot better about the Mormon baptism. Anne would be the first to understand what it is to be pressured by outer circumstances, and unable to exercise your free choice, in very difficult situations.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/16/2017 12:14AM by Tevai.

This was a beautiful and peaceful response. I hope someday I can visit where she lived. I can't even imagine her bravery.

The thing that really gets me is that people who "do" LDS baptisms on behalf of other people believe sincerely that they are doing something positive, and something that the other person would want. It doesn't seem to occur to them that maybe the decedent wouldn't want to be a Mormon.

I no longer recall the name of the German woman I went through the temple for. I have long since apologized to her, and I hope she knows. I meant well at the time. Didn't we all?

I doubt you were the only one that did the work for Miss Frank.

Bang beat me to it--many individuals have been baptized for Anne Frank.

Please read Tevai's comments carefully and let yourself off the hook as you bless the memory of this courageous young woman.

I'd add, that it's very important to understand what happened during the Holocaust so that it will never be repeated. The reading of Anne Frank's journal is part of all of our education.

The LDS leaders ought to sincerely apologize to the Jewish people for the outrage of continually performing vicarious baptisms for Holocaust victims and other Jews. In fact, they ought to apologize to ANYONE and cease the practice for those who feel this practice is incompatible with their family beliefs or customs. Very best wishes! The Boner

Indeed. I wonder what TBM's would say about the multiple baptisms for all kinds of people, both historic figures and family members who wanted nothing to do with mormonism.

Since faithful paying of tithes is required for a temple recommend, it seems a bit off-putting to know that you are spending money for duplicate work............

Tevai , Thank you so much for your insight & kind words. This has really been eating at me lately. ( I guess those are the correct words. ) Thank you, also,Bang, BYUBoner & Chicken N. Backpacks. I hadn't thought that maybe others have done her work , also.

Anne Frank has been post-humously baptized through no fault of her own many times over.

Tevai and others are correct it wasn't your fault you were doing exactly as you'd been taught all your life by brainwashing and dogma.

Jewish faith is sacrosanct. The Mormons attempt to force their religion on them in death, what Christians tried and failed to do during their lifetime.

They may murder the body through pogroms and genocides, and have done so in the name of God over millenia. But they cannot murder the Jewish soul.

One of my late Jewish cousins and his family were good friends of the Frank family. They moved together from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933 and were neighbors who spent Sundays together with their children, before the war.

Cousin was a university professor of journalism who is responsible for Otto publishing Anne's diary. Otto wasn't going to at first, until my cousin insisted it must be published to preserve her record for future generations. He was also one of two expert witnesses to authenticate it.

I didn't do the baptism for her. I did everything else.

What exactly is involved in doing temple work for the deceased? Did yours precede or follow her post-humous dunkings?

Is that something that would be done multiple times like her baptisms have been? Or only once?

You go through the regular, full "endowment," just like you would for yourself. Only you do it "for" the person on your name slip. So you do the secret handshakes, the covenants, etc.
That only happens for a name after dead-dunking.
It's dead-endowing.

For the OP, don't worry about it -- as others have said, you weren't the only one to do "work" in her name.

And if there is an afterlife (doubtful, but possible), there isn't any mormonism there...so if that's the case, Anne Frank might very well be looking down and laughing at the absurdity of mormons doing temple work "for" her. :)

If a ceremony is meaningless, then it's meaningless and has no actual effect.

Interesting how very much emotional hook these continue to hold, though.

The ceremony isn't really meaningless, it is a fundamental mechanism of faith-affirmation for LDS folks: "Being the keepers of the One True Religion, we have a moral obligation to baptize all of humanity, living or dead."


And while the deceased might not care, their relatives may highly object to the names of their family members being used to reinforce the faith of those who choose to belong to an idiotic, comic-book religion started by a libidinous, loathsome charlatan.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/16/2017 09:05PM by 3X.

Anne Frank's birthday is June 12th. She'd be 88 if she were still living.

I attend shul with a Holocaust survivor who is the same age as Anne. She still has the tattoo on her forearm as a grim reminder.

a language similar to Spanish - I'm tired and can't remember what it is called. It is related to Spanish as Yiddish is related to German. The languages developed during the Diaspora.

My client had the tattoo - in blue ink, with unmistakable European numbers (like the 7 with a hatch-mark through it) on her arm. And she had been in one of the camps.

I don't remember exactly where she came from; it may have been somewhere in North Africa. She started crying at my desk. She told me, "This is the first time I have been able to speak in my own language to another adult woman since I came to America." That was profoundly moving, and I was so grateful that I had learned Spanish. Our communication was a bit lumpy, but each of us was able to understand most of what the other said.

The language is Ladino.

It is primarily a mix of Medieval Spanish plus Hebrew (some Hebrew from medieval times, and some from contemporary times)...and, in my opinion, Ladino is one of the most beautiful languages on this planet.

If you go over to You Tube and search for "Durme mi angelico" (a very old Sephardi Jewish lullaby), by Yehoram Gaon (one of the most well-known Sephardi Israeli vocalists), I think you will really like what you hear.

When the Jews were expelled from Spain and (later) Portugal in the fifteenth century (with one side-effect of this expulsion being Columbus's voyage west, where he and his at least partly-Jewish crew "discovered" the Americas), many Sephardim did go to nearby North Africa, where most of them spent the next few centuries.

Some are still there; many others immigrated to Israel, especially after Israel became a state in 1948. (During WWII, because most of the Sephardim were not in Nazi-controlled areas in Europe, they largely escaped the Holocaust, but unfortunately some of them did get caught up and were then sent to the camps.)

When I was growing up, some of my classmates had parents and grandparents who were Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors, and one of my classmates, in particular, was a Sephardi Jew. Her relatives had come to the United States "from" Turkey [more or less ;) ], and she (inadvertently on her part) became one of the most important influences in my life. In large part because of her, I am today not only a Jew, but I also identify as Sephardi whenever that identification becomes important.

(Not only are the languages different between Ashkenazim (Yiddish/German-based) and Sephardim (Ladino/Spanish-based), so are a number of sometimes fairly important points of Jewish ritual, observance, or matter of Jewish law or tradition. (Easy example: Sephardim can eat rice during Passover, but Ashkenazim cannot. If you have grown up in the Spanish-speaking parts of the United States, this is a HUGE practical difference if you are an observant Jew!)

I am so glad you were able to talk to this woman in Spanish/Ladino. To her, you must have seemed like a literal gift from God. :)



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/18/2017 06:22AM by Tevai.

You cannot choose whether you are Ashkenazi or Sephardic based on a what a former classmate was. It's about where your Jewish descendants came from. If you're a convert, technically you can choose your minhag, but converts usually have a mishmash of either customs.

hmmmm Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If you're a convert, technically you can
> choose your minhag...

I am a convert. ["Minhag" means tradition, and specifically for the purposes of this thread, Sephardi tradition or Ashkenazi tradition.]

> ...but converts usually have a
> mishmash of either customs.

True in general [depending on many other factors: the tradition you convert within...the specifically Jewish geographical area you live in (comes down to neighborhoods in New York, but in Southern California not so much)...the ethnicity of you or your spouse...or what you feel is the true, inner, "you"...what tradition you want to raise your children in...what shuls you have practical access to on Shabbat and Jewish holidays...perhaps close personal connections (friends, etc.)...]

...and true for me, too.

Most of my conversion class was (in the terms we are speaking about here) choosing the Ashkenazi minhag, but we also had several people choosing the Sephardi minhag (with additional choosing for ethnicity: Iranian Jews for example, because we have [relatively] lots of Iranian Jews in Los Angeles, but also some other ethnicities as well (I'm pretty sure someone was converting into the Syrian "sub-minhag," as it were, and there were also a few people who, for various reasons, were converting into a kind of generic "minhag" for various reasons: racial intermarriage, or---at the time I converted---they were gay, and were affiliating with one of the gay shuls which existed at that time, and I don't know if these still exist anymore.

Our first night of classes, each of us was handed a complete list of all of the synagogues in what I assume was the greater Los Angeles area (each with minhag, etc. identifications), and told that our overall assignment, beginning with the upcoming Shabbat, was shul shopping: to visit all of those shuls on that list which were interesting to us, and gradually decide which one/ones we felt were, to us, "home."

Some of us already knew what shul we would be affiliating with...most of us didn't. Minhag was important to some of us (I am thinking specifically of the couples here, where one person in the couple was already Jewish, and the other person was becoming a Jew)...not that important to others of us.

Some of us didn't even know what "minhag" (not just the word...the CONCEPT) was when our conversion classes began---generally, they thought that Ashkenazis were the only Jews on the planet, and that Yiddish was the only Jewish language that existed.

For many in our class, that very long list of synagogues we were handed on our first night of classes was the real beginning of their Jewish learning.

P.S. Isn't it true that at least some born Jews effectively change their minhag? Think of Ashkenazi/Sephardi marriages (or Ethiopian/Ashkenazi or Ethiopian/Sephardi marriages in Israel), for example, and how an "intermarried" couple not only chooses to live their married life united, as a couple, but additionally makes the choice to raise their children in a specific minhag (which would be different from one of the parents)...

...and I'm pretty sure that there are rabbis who "changed their minhag" during the process of them becoming rabbis.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/18/2017 08:58AM by Tevai.

Boy, I think I'm learning more here about being Jewish than I have going to worship services at synagogue. I had not heard of a minhag before today.

How do Jews identify? As Jews! Wherever they are. Sephardic or Ashkenazi is from a part of the world with their respective customs and ethnic backgrounds. As a whole, they've become a melting pot in their own right as Tevai so well explained in her response above.

I probably identify more as an Ashkenazi since that's my ancestral connection to my being Jewish. To my "feeling" Jewish while I may still 'identify' as Ashkenazi on some level, being Jewish is so much deeper than whether we're either of those.

Tevai would understand what I mean when I say that, I think.

Jews wherever we are in the world identify with each other. It's universal, IMHO.

Ummm, everyone knows work for the dead doesn't actually do anything, right?

Seems we act like we still believe in it, getting offended and all.

I'm sure some Mickey Mouse Society is doing some ceremony on my behalf, and I don't really care.

To speed our so-called recovery, we need to stop promoting hurt feelings.

It's a vile practice. Baptizing Holocaust victims post-humously is the reason the Jews went to task with the Mormon church, when in 1995 it promised it would cease and desist this terrible practice.

Since then Anne Frank has been dead dunked at least six times that have been documented. And several prior to 1995.

It's practice is reprehensible. And an outrage to the Jewish nation.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/18/2017 08:20PM by Amyjo.

our home teacher is a convert to TSCC and also, born a Jew, will die a Jew. His family immigrated from Morocco. We spend his visits talking about Jewish customs, which has been wonderful for him and for us.