Someone was buried in Florence Marmor’s grave, and it was not Florence Marmor.
When Mrs. Marmor visited her deceased husband’s cemetery plot in Flushing, Queens, one afternoon, she found that someone had been freshly buried in the spot next to his, where she had planned to rest someday. No one could tell her why.
Strange and wrenching discoveries like that have sprung up repeatedly in Jewish communities over the past few decades as families have discovered that the cemetery properties where they expected to be buried among spouses, children and parents are caught in a legal knot that no one can untangle.
The reason: the Jewish burial societies that sold the gravesites no longer have administrators. Founded by the immigrant ancestors of the people caught in this bind, the societies, in effect, have died.
This is not an isolated situation.
Real estate developers have been known to demolish small cemetaries and rural family burial plots by quickly bring in a bulldoxer and ‘burying’ the evidence.
Real estate developers have had an almost unrestricted ability to get away with unscrupulous deeds, including cemetary desecration, in Fairfax County, Virginia where I used to live.
What used to be a semi-rural environment is now jam-packed with living units and suffers almost continuous traffic jams due to massive over development and a road system that has been massively overloaded by those living unit dwellers.