Even Marmor, the student of Jewish genealogy, has confronted the problem. Marmor says she got involved in a burial society because she couldn't reach the man who was supposed to be running it to get him to check on the status of her own grave, which was located next to that of her husband's, who died in 1988.
"I call the cemetery, and they tell me that everyone has died—that there's no one to reach," she says.
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She filed papers to take over the society and learned that it still held many, many unused grave sites. She was also shocked to learn that someone else already occupied the grave she had bought. Someone had given away or sold her grave without her knowledge.
"A Mr. Adler was buried there," she says. "I don't know how it happened. Fortunately, there was a site on the other side of my husband."
It's easy to get a glimpse of the black market in graves by sifting through the pages of Craigslist, noting the individuals selling graves they purportedly own. State Cemetery officials constantly complain to Craigslist that the company must have proof of ownership before posting those ads on the website. Under state law, unless the company has been given proof of ownership, it is illegal to advertise graves.
At times, Barkin says, unscrupulous society directors will demand fees or dues before they release a grave to the family that has purchased it, knowing that Jewish law demands burial as soon as possible. Grieving relatives, faced with this demand, often just cave in and pay the supposed fees, whether owed or not.
"If you just think about the money involved—in the entire United States—between perpetual care and operating expenses . . . we're talking about billions of dollars!" says John Lucker, a Connecticut man currently suing Bayside Cemetery in Queens. "It's understandable that there are problems. Especially when most members are either dead or don't know that they have a stake."
Lucker is suing the managers of the cemetery for failing to keep the site in good condition and using the money set aside for that purpose on other things. The cemetery denies the allegations.
"A lot of cemeteries have unclaimed graves, which probably will never be used because the burial societies have gone away, and the papers that prove what people are entitled to are lost," Lucker says.
If the black-market trade in grave sites owned by burial societies is troubling, so is the notion that so much money gathered from many trusting individuals is now in the hands of a relative few. And tracking whether burial societies are misusing those funds isn't easy. "Burial societies have added risk for abuse because people tend to trust more, the laws are generally lax, and you usually have non-financial experts running it," says Hayden Burrus, a Florida-based expert in the financial management of cemeteries. "When you can pull money out with no oversight, that's going to create a temptation."
The state recommends that burial societies hand over the deeds to individual graves to the members who paid for them. That way, if the society dissolves, the member can still go to the cemetery and prove that they own a plot.
Within the Division of Cemeteries, there is the feeling that burial societies need to be more closely regulated—especially those with large grave holdings and those in control of significant amounts of money.
There has been some talk of late, sources say, for tighter regulation by the attorney general's office, which is supposed to oversee charities. But bills, which seek that increased control, tend to die in Albany's shark tank of a legislature.
Barkin puts that situation this way: "Legislation has been proposed to allow cemeteries to reclaim unused graves from inactive burial societies, but to date, that effort has not been successful."
