New York Jewish Week/JTA — 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 months ago.

Then panic set in: After removing it, was New York City really planning to reinstall the plaque honoring Pierre Laval, the prime minister of Vichy France, the World War II-era Nazi puppet state, who was executed for treason?

“It’s one thing… making a decision to remove something,” Rosensaft told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It’s quite another to make a conscious decision [to do] 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, a hero of the French army during World War I who later, as Vichy’s president, became a chief 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.

What he didn’t know at the time was that Laval’s name had been removed back in November after city officials deemed it a tripping hazard. The city’s cold snap and........

© The Times of Israel