Canadian Mormons commemorate Yom Hashoah

After speaking with a prominent Orthodox rabbi in Montreal a few years ago, I had the distinct impression that great things were going to happen on the Jewish-Mormon front in that beautiful city. One of the stake presidents (regional leaders) is Eric Jarvis, a psychiatrist at Jewish General Hospital, and he and his wife Catherine have engaged the Jewish community in a spirit of mutual respect and understanding that is truly inspiring.

Last weekend President Jarvis’s stake hosted a Yom Hashoah commemoration on behalf of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue of Montreal. The stake president’s presentation was followed by one made by a female rabbi, who declared herself “a member of the LGBT community and a friend of the Roma.” Unsurprisingly, the Canadian Jewish press focused on President Jarvis’s reiteration of the church’s ban on performing temple ordinances for Holocaust victims unless they were direct descendants of living Mormons. Regular readers know that I have a self-imposed ban on blogging about this manufactured controversy, but I think that it was appropriate for President Jarvis to address the issue in that setting.