http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kcur/local-kcur-844649.mp3
Kansas City – This started last year when a neo-Nazi group near Springfield, Missouri volunteered to pick up trash along a section of highway. A US Supreme Court's been pretty clear that all kinds of political organizations have that right and "adopt-a-highway" signs with the group's name went up on the road last fall. Then, the state legislature decided to put up some more signs, naming that stretch after Abraham Joshua Heschel, a rabbi who narrowly escaped Nazi Germany, and later worked closely with Martin Luther King. But, the late activist's daughter, Susannah Heschel, calls the idea vulgar.
Heschel: I don't think my father would feel at all honored by this. To put a Jew together with a neo-Nazi he would find repugnant, and vulgar. I know that. It was not his way.
Heschel says her father refused to forgive the Nazi's for the Holocaust, and would have been offended by having his name attached to a section of highway already associated with, and frequented by neo-Nazis.
It would be different Heschel says, if a long stretch of the highway were named for her dad but she objects to having section honoring her father begin and end with the boundaries of the stretch, adopted by neo-Nazis.
