(JEWISH GROUP) A maligned marker honoring a French Nazi sympathizer is off NYC's streets -- for now

Menachem Rosensaft was pleasantly surprised this week to learn that a historical marker honoring a Nazi collaborator that has been a bane of his existence for years had been removed.

Then panic set in: Could New York City really be planning to reinstall the plaque honoring Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister during World War II who was executed for treason?

“It’s one thing of making a decision to remove something,” Rosensaft told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It’s quite another to make a conscious decision, of doing the work in order to replace it and put it back.”

For years, Rosensaft — general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress and the son of Holocaust survivors — has lobbied against the plaques honoring Laval and Philippe Pétain, hero of the French army during World War I and later head collaborator with the Nazi regime. They are two of 206 names embedded on a half-mile stretch of Lower Broadway known as the “Canyon of Heroes.”

Rosensaft published an essay several years ago urging the removal of the plaques. He wrote another last month in conjunction with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

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