Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel on Tuesday called on Mitt Romney to tell the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to stop doing proxy baptisms in the names of dead Jews, including Holocaust victims such as Wiesel's parents.

UPDATED POST: 5:10 P.M.

LDS officials have reached The Anti-Defamation league to say, according to an ADL press release that:

...an individual member inappropriately submitted the names, an action the LDS said was "clearly against the policy of the church." The church has indefinitely suspended the individual's ability to access their genealogy records.

Abraham Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor, said in the statement that he accepted this as a good faith promise from the church. It's critical to halt the practice because, Foxman writes:

Holocaust victims died precisely because they were Jewish. Listing Jews as 'Christian" on one of the most researched genealogical sites in the world inadvertently aids and abets denial of the Holocaust. Perhaps the ultimate solution would be for the church to revisit its theological position on posthumously baptizing Jews and believers outside the Mormon Church, just as other religions have reconsidered centuries-old beliefs.

ORIGINAL POST:

It's not known whether Romney, a former Mormon bishop and still an active believer, baptized any late Jewish people when he participated in the LDS church's practice.

The Republican presidential candidate's not saying and neither is the LDS Church, according to Huffington Post where Andrea Stone is tracking the story.

"I think it's scandalous. Not only objectionable, it's scandalous," Wiesel told Stone, who notes:

Previous discoveries of proxy baptisms of Jews over the past 18 years have outraged Jewish leaders. Such baptisms are especially problematic since so many Jewish people over the centuries had been forced to convert to Christianity against their will and murdered or expelled from countries when they did not.

Romney is already on record that when he was a bishop in the church in Boston, he participated in this practice.

Jonathan Darman, now of The Daily Beast, and Lisa Miller interviewed Romney for Newsweek in October 2007. They wrote:

When asked by Newsweek if he has done baptisms for the dead -- in which Mormons find the names of dead people of all faiths and baptize them, as an LDS spokesperson says, to "open the door" to the highest heaven-- he looked slightly startled and answered, "I have in my life, but I haven't recently."

On the New England Cable News Oct. 10, 2007, he was asked again about baptisms for the Dead and this time he ducked. He reiterated that he participated fully in his church but ducks the question on whether one practice permitted by the church, but required, is baptizing dead people.

Stone reported that:

...formerly Mormon researcher, Helen Radkey, some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had submitted Wiesel's name to a restricted genealogy website as "ready" for posthumous proxy baptism. Radkey found that the name of Wiesel had been submitted to the database for the deceased, from which a separate process for proxy baptism could be initiated. Radkey also said that the names of Wiesel's deceased father and maternal grandfather had been submitted to the site.

...Wiesel was among a group of Jewish leaders who campaigned against the practice and prompted a 2010 pact by which the Mormon Church promised to at least prevent proxy baptism requests for Holocaust victims. Wiesel said that proxy baptisms have been performed on behalf of 650,000 Holocaust dead.

According to Mormon theology, baptism is essential for salvation and the practice of baptizing the dead merely offers that option to that person, it doesn't make them Mormon or members of the church. ..

The LDS Church website also says,

...Some have misunderstood that when baptisms for the dead are performed the names of deceased persons are being added to the membership records of the Church. This is not the case.

Huffington Post offered the option of a reply to the Romney campaign but all that came back, Stone writes, is an errant email from someone suggesting they ignore this.

WOULD A POSTHUMOUS BAPTISM... for your late loved ones bother you, please you, make no difference? Should Romney comment on this practice, in potential conflict with his church?