The LDS Church has been asked to provide genealogical records that could help identify between 300,000 and 400,000 Jewish Holocaust victims who may have established bank accounts in Switzerland.
Church spokesman Dale Bills confirmed that the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand asked for copies of records to further their work with the Volcker Commission. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is heading up an audit of Swiss bank accounts, hoping to identify Holocaust victims who had untold millions deposited that were never retrieved.For years, the descendants of those victims have said they can't get enough information from Swiss banks to determine whether assets still remain that are rightfully theirs.
In response to the request, Bills echoed comments by Michael Otterson, director of media relations for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who told Reuters news agency that "our intent is to respond to it as a goodwill gesture, but we are still waiting to see if there are any objections."
In 1995, the church signed an agreement with the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors to stop doing proxy baptisms in its temples for Jewish Holocaust victims. The agreement came after that organization strongly objected to the posthumous baptisms, which Latter-day Saints perform not only for their own ancestors but for millions of others who have died.
The agreement also stipulated that the church would "remove from the next issue of the International Genealogical Index (IGI) the names of all known posthumously baptized Jewish Holocaust victims who are not direct ancestors of living members of the church."
Bills said those names have been removed from the IGI, which is a database that is available to the public for research on family history. The database is also one source of names for which Latter-day Saints perform proxy baptisms and other ordinances in their temples.
But the church still has private records of the names, Bills said, "otherwise, we couldn't help them (the Volcker Commission) with their request."
As part of the 1995 pact, the church also agreed to provide a list of names to the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors; the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in Washington, D.C.; A Living Memorial to the Holocaust-Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City; the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles; and Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.
The proxy baptisms were "a labor of love from our point of view, but it was not seen as that by the Jewish community, and we discontinued it," Otterson said.
Bills said the church "does not have a concerted effort or targeted effort to do Jewish family history work. We'll do whatever family history work we're able to do given permission from custodians of those records. We'll microfilm records where we're allowed to do so as given by permission of custodians of records."
Family history work entails gathering names, birth, marriage and death dates and other statistical information regarding deceased ancestors. To date, the church has collected more than 2 billion names on a variety of records.
Bills said there's a definite distinction between family history work and temple ordinance work -- including proxy baptisms -- which are performed by proxy for people who have died.
Regarding Jewish Holocaust victims, "any temple work (performed) needs to be done by direct line ancestors of (LDS Church) members."
Bills said the church has made "no formal agreements with any other ethnic or religious groups that restrict the performance of temple ordinances. We just want to make sure we differentiate between gathering family history data -- which we do when we have permission -- and (performing) temple ordinances."