In response to the decision of a neo-Nazi group to adopt a section of highway in Missouri and keep it clean, a state lawmaker wants to rename the road after Abraham Joshua Heschel, a prominent Conservative rabbi who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. But the rabbi’s daughter objects to the move.
“I don’t want Nazis stomping on the highway named for my father,” Susannah Heschel, a professor at Dartmouth College, was quoted by the Jerusalem Post as saying.
“It may be an attempt to teach the neo-Nazis a lesson, but I think it’s an affront to my father’s dignity to attach his name to a neo-Nazi highway,” she added.
In proposing legislation for the name change on a road in Springfield,
State Rep. Sara Lampe said she had first consulted with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Kansas City.
The neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Movement, said in a note on its Web site that the legislation is “spineless” and “will no doubt spur a backlash from the local people.”
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