Beginning with a 12,000-strong Mormon youth festival Saturday and ending with ceremonies officiated by LDS Church leaders Sunday, the Idaho Falls Temple was rededicated over the weekend.
Sunday's rededication of the 77-year-old temple, the first erected in Idaho by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was presided over by President Henry B. Eyring, first counselor in the Utah-based faith's governing First Presidency.
Eyring said the temple, located near the Snake River in downtown Idaho Falls, was a special place for him and his wife, Kathleen.
"This is the temple I came to during the years that my wife and I were at Ricks College [now Brigham Young University-Idaho], and so I have sweet memories of this place. And also of the people in this place," he said in a news release. "This is the place of faith among Latter-day Saints."
On Saturday, Eyring attended a cultural music, drama and dance celebration staged by 12,000 southeastern Idaho youths inside Idaho State University's Holt Arena in Pocatello.
Other church representatives attending both the ISU event and Sunday's ceremonies included Ronald A. Rasband of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Richard J. Maynes of the Presidency of the Seventy, Bishop Dean M. Davies, first counselor in the Presiding Bishopric, and Wilford W. Andersen, Bradley D. Foster and K. Brett Nattress of the Seventy.
During the recently completed public open house tours, more than 250,000 people visited the Idaho Falls Temple to see the results of two years of extensive interior renovations, not just structural, electrical and mechanical, but also painstaking restoration of historic murals.
Now that the structure has been rededicated, it is open only to Mormons in good standing for various rites such as eternal marriages and family sealings.
The Idaho Falls Temple was first dedicated in 1945. Since then, Idaho's Mormons have added temples in Twin Falls, Boise and Rexburg. A fifth temple will be dedicated in November in Meridian, and plans were announced in April for construction of a sixth Idaho temple, in Pocatello.
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