A maligned marker honouring a French Nazi sympathiser is off NYC’s streets – for now

JTA – Menachem Rosensaft was pleasantly surprised this week to learn that a historical marker honouring 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 honouring Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister during World War II who was executed for treason? 

“It’s one thing to make 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 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 honouring 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. 

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 cold snap and winter weather have wreaked havoc on the pavement, causing more than a dozen markers in total to be removed. 

They could return. The Alliance for Downtown New York, the non-profit organisation that installed the plaques, plans to replace them eventually, The New York Times reported. The Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers has previously fended off calls to remove the markers. 

In 2017, following the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted that his administration would remove all hate symbols from city property – starting with the Philippe Pétain plaque downtown. The plaque is still in place. 

But in 2018, the monuments commission recommended that the Pétain plaque remain where it is, though it advocated for “re-contextualising them in place to continue the public dialogue”. The commission also recommended the removal of all official references to the name “Canyon of Heroes” so as not to mischaracterise the markers as a “celebration” of any historical figures. 

In 2023, following a national reckoning over Confederate statues in which many of them were torn down, then-Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, who is Jewish, attended a Holocaust Remembrance Day event where he said it was “unacceptable” that Laval and Pétain’s names remained on the marker. Levine also sent a letter to the city’s Public Design Commission calling on the city to remove the plaques. 

JTA has reached out to Mark Levine’s office – he is now the city’s comptroller – and City Hall for comment on the situation. 

The Alliance for Downtown New York contends that the removal of any of the plaques is a form of erasing history. 

“Trying to render history free of mistakes, free of contradictions and horror, risks sanitising our past and perhaps makes us more likely to repeat those mistakes,” Andrew Breslau, a representative from the Alliance for Downtown New York told The New York Times this week when it broke the news that Laval’s name had at least temporarily disappeared. 

Before they became war criminals responsible for the deaths of more than 75 000 Jews, Laval and Pétain were honoured in ticker-tape parades in 1931. Laval was even named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” that same year for his management of the Great Depression in France. 

Rosensaft concedes that an additional plaque with the full context of who these men were would be “better than nothing”. But he said he wouldn’t give up advocating for their full removal. 

“Controversial is one thing,” Rosensaft said. “And being convicted war criminals, both sentenced to death – one executed, the other had his sentence commuted – responsible for sending more than 70 000 Jews, deporting them from France and sending them to their death, is in a separate category.”