ONE recent afternoon, three sets of parents, each with early-teenage triplets in tow, arrived at the Old Montefiore Cemetery and filed into the entranceway of a roofless mausoleum, which was lined with shelves of lighted candles and prayer books. Inside is the gravesite of the Lubavitcher grand rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994, leaving no successor.
The children waited restlessly in the small courtyard around the rebbe's grave as their parents tore up pieces of paper bearing handwritten prayers and scattered the scraps by the grave. The parents said they had come to the cemetery, in Cambria Heights, Queens, to offer thanks. All had once struggled with infertility until they received a dollar bill and a blessing from the rabbi, who would dispense plenty of both on Sundays at 770 Eastern Parkway, the Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights.
Jews from Russia to Roslyn used to come seeking the rebbe's blessing. "Easy pregnancy, healthy child," he would tell them in Yiddish.
All three husbands at the cemetery that day still carried the rebbe's dollar bill. One of them, Uri Halabe, took his out and kissed it. He and his wife, Brigitte, an Orthodox couple from Los Angeles, said they'd tried unsuccessfully to conceive for nine years. "Then one day, I said, 'This is my last straw; I got to go see the rebbe,' " Mr. Halabe recalled. With the help of in vitro fertilization, Mrs. Halabe gave birth to Jonathan, Jeremy and Joshua, now 13.
Accompanying Mr. Halabe was his friend Ben-Zion Alcalay, whose wife, Carol, also became pregnant with triplets not long after receiving a blessing from the rebbe. The three 13-year-olds - Sofia, Eliahu and Benjamin - sprinkled shreds of torn-up prayers in front of the rebbe's modest headstone as men paying their respects rocked on their heels and chanted.
Many of the rebbe's followers and scores of non-Lubavitch Jews swear that he continues to bestow fertility from the grave. Dr. Richard V. Grazi, director of a Brooklyn clinic called Genesis Fertility and Reproductive Medicine, which has a patient base that is heavily Orthodox Jewish, said many previously infertile patients had told him they finally conceived after a visit to the gravesite. Prospective parents also seek a blessing online by e-mailing prayers to the grave via chabad.org, a Lubavitch Web site.
"Many people believe disease is controlled to a certain extent by God and that infertility is a spiritual affliction," Dr. Grazi said. "You ask what brought them the child and they say, 'It was the rebbe.' And it's really impossible to prove either way."
Some Lubavitchers believe that the rebbe is the messiah and will return any day. As the children and their parents ate bagels and whitefish salad in a house near the cemetery that serves as a visitors' center, young Benjamin Alcalay suggested they hold another triplet reunion upon the rebbe's return, and everyone broke out in joyous laughter.
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