The Jan. 27 resolution calls on the United Nations to help free the soldiers held captive “in violation of international law.” The resolution is to be forwarded to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

The Senate move might not win the Israelis’ freedom, Kean acknowledged in a telephone interview a few days later, but in the absence of decisive action by the international community, he felt, it was time to take action himself.

“The United States has a special role to play in the world,” he said. “We Americans have a responsibility to make our voices heard at whatever level, and to make our values felt.”

Corporal Gilad Shalit was abducted in Gaza by Palestinian militants on June 25 last year and it is believed that he is being held by Hamas. Sergeants Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were taken by Hizbullah in northern Israel on July 12, an event that triggered last summer’s war. (The resolution, in its original form, mistakenly attributed all three kidnappings to Hizbullah.)

Kean, who visited Israel last year on a trip for state and federal leaders sponsored by the Aspen Institute, was the only state senator to participate in a Dec. 20 press conference in Scotch Plains, where politicians and Jewish leaders called for the soldiers’ release.

“I was outraged when the soldiers were abducted in the first place,” said Kean, whose district includes parts of Essex, Morris, Somerset, and Union counties. “I thought at the time that the international community would take a stand on what was obviously a violation of human rights and international law.”

International issues like this figure more often in Washington politics than at the state level, but Kean, who lost to Robert Menendez in his bid last November to move on to the United States Senate, said he believes such an effort could be initiated from any level of government.

“I think it’s more than appropriate that state legislators raise their voice, and I hope that Gov. Corzine is going to support it,” he said.

Gov. Jon Corzine did call for the safe and speedy release of the three soldiers at pro-Israel rallies last summer during the war with Hizbullah, describing it as an absolute requirement for the peaceful end to the conflict, but he has not taken any official action on the matter.

Kean said he hoped the initiative would also inspire leaders in other states to show their solidarity with the three soldiers. Already, he said, he had received a call from Pennsylvania state Rep. Babette Josephs (D-Philadelphia), asking to see the text of the resolution.

“As people see that we are united against this kind of action, and as Congress sees this activity bubbling up from the state legislators, perhaps it will move them to act, and hopefully the State Department will also respond,” Kean said.

Such involvement, he pointed out, has been multi-generational in the Kean family. His father, former NJ Gov. Tom Kean Sr., took a stand against genocide and torture, and his grandfather, Robert Winthrop Kean, he said, was the first person to stand up in Congress in the 1940s and speak out against the Holocaust.

The resolution was welcomed by Lori Price Abrams, director of the Community Relations Committee of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, which cosponsored, with other federations and the NJ State Association of Jewish Federations, the news conference in December.

Kean, she said, “has been very sensitive to issues of concern to the Jewish community, and he has shown himself to be supportive of Israel.”

Price Abrams suggested that Kean’s bid for the U.S. Senate made him take a closer look at the issue of the kidnapping; she noted, however, that his support for Israel has been consistent. “He took seriously what we said at the conference, and he has done what he said he would do,” she said.