It is absolutely appropriate (and quite beautiful!) to name a child after a deceased grandparent (Sephardi custom is to name after living relatives). The feminine form is Meirah and for Eliezer, you can choose Elie, Elliah, and Azriela.

The mitzvah of Pidyon Shevuyim, redeeming captives, is a very weighty obligation according to Halaha (Jewish Law).  It is important to understand the context in which the mitzvah was construed because it informs our ability to assess our contemporary obligations. 

During the time of the Talmud, Jews were regularly kidnapped because Gentiles believed that the Jewish community would pay the kidnappers the ransom money.  They were correct.  The Talmud obliges us to pay the ransom money. The mitzvah was so important that Maimonides wrote that it is the highest form of charity, superseding all others.  At the same time, it is important to state that the Mishnah itself limits the monetary value that it is appropriate to pay for a captive when it says, “Captives should not be ransomed for more than their value as a precaution for their general good” (Gittin 4:6).  The rabbis had to consider the fact that the Jewish community would not flourish if costly levels extortion became a regular communal occurrence.  At times in Jewish history, the balance between redeeming captives while doing so “within economic reason” has been difficult to achieve. One of the most well known examples of this tension is when the great 13^th Century scholar Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg refused to allow himself to be ransomed for 20,000 marks, which German Jews were willing to pay, because he felt it would encourage more kidnappings.  As a result, he died in prison.

The situation with Gilad Shalit is very complicated.  He is not being held for financial ransom.  He is being held as a political pawn as Hamas attempts to extort the Israeli government to release Palestinian prisoners within the Israeli prison system.  Many of these prisoners are terrorists who are directly responsible for the murder of innocent Israeli citizens.  The government has to assess the likelihood that these terrorists would return to killing Israelis should they be released.  As a result, the government must perform a gut wrenching moral calculus in order to determine how to proceed.  The questions are complex: “What is the value of a human life?”  “Is it morally justified to save one life if it is likely to put the lives of other people in jeopardy?”  “Is it morally acceptable to reduce the punishment of people who have committed egregious crimes in order to save another person’s life?”  These are just a few of the questions Israelis must struggle to answer.  As a result, I don’t think that the situation with Gilad Shalit fits into the classical framework Pidyon Shevuyim, though the textual tradition that deals with the topic can surely guide us through some of these questions.

Your query, it seems to me, touches on a larger question: “To what degree should Diaspora Jews stay connected to what happens in the State of Israel?”  I believe that the future of the Jewish people largely depends on the ways in which Israeli and Diaspora Jews mediate their often fragile relationship.  As the gulf between these two great Jewish communities widens, our responsibility to bridge this gap is ever more pressing.  It is important to stay connected to the situation with Gilad Shalit not only for the sake of effective advocacy and pressure, but because we must understand the ways in which Israelis struggle with the above questions.  For example, this summer Israelis expressed their support for Gilad’s family through solidarity marches across Israel.  For many, these marches were meant as a signal to the government that the Israeli public was ready to give up a great deal in order to secure Gilad’s return home.  Why?  In some way, the answer must be connected to the fact that every Israeli parent knows that Gilad could easily have been or be their son.  At the same time, there were counter protests by Israelis saying that releasing terrorists to save Gilad’s life is unethical since it will lead to the future loss of life. 

Perhaps the most important thing that Diaspora Jews can do is educate one another about the extreme difficulty of life in Israel.  This is what seems to be off our radar screen.  Advocacy seems to be futile since we are dealing with Hamas.  But, reminding American Jews that this situation is aggrieving the hearts and souls of Israelis is very important, and demonstrating to Israelis that we too are distressed by Gilad’s dreadful captivity is equally important for the sake of our relationship.       

Your question is about an extremely important issue.  For starters, we should be following and responding to all things that happen in Israel, as it is our Homeland and central to the future of the Jewish people.  I disagree with those who suggest that our role as hovivei tzion, as lovers of Zion, is to publicly support whatever Israel does in the political, military, legal, or socio / religious realm.  True love of Israel obliges one to support a political / religious agenda that reflects his / her vision of Zionism.  The Rotem Bill threatens a more open, pluralistic environment that can give expression to diverse expressions of Judaism.  In my opinion, those of us who believe that the founders of Israel intended to build such an open society have a moral obligation to fight any movement that encroaches on this vision.  There is nothing more Zionist than that.    

So why the fuss over this bill?  The situation in Israel is quite complicated with regard to the question of ‘who is a Jew.’  As of now, there are two different spheres in which this question is formally asked and answered: the civil and the religious.  In the civil sphere, the question is directly related to who can automatically become a citizen of the State of Israel under the Law of Return.  The answer has always been anyone with a Jewish grandparent on the maternal or paternal side.  This law was formulated on the basis of the Nuremberg Laws, which institutionalized anti-Semitism in Germany and defined someone as Jewish enough to be persecuted if s/he had one Jewish grandparent.  Israel thus extended automatic citizenship to anyone with a Jewish grandparent, a powerful reaction to the horrors of German anti-Semitism. 

However, in Israel, there is not a separation of religion and state.  All questions of marriage, divorce, and burial are defined by the Rabbinate.  The Rabbinate defines a Jew as one who is born to a halachically (legally) Jewish mother or undergoes a valid halachic conversion.  If a citizen does not fall under this definition, s/he cannot be married or divorced by the State of Israel, since the Rabbinate performs the only legally recognized life cycle events in Israel.  As a result of this, there are hundreds of thousands of citizens of the state who are not considered Jewish by the Rabbinate, and who therefore cannot get married by the State.  Many of these citizens are immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

To complicate matters a bit more, there are Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) rabbis within the rabbinate who have been undoing the conversions performed by government sanctioned Orthodox rabbis who were not Haredi.  This has led to a profoundly problematic situation in which people who were formally converted by the state (through the rabbinate) have now had their Judaism “revoked” by the state (through these Haredi elements in the rabbinate), an unprecedented move in Jewish history (the Talmud itself teaches that one may not undo a halachically valid conversion!). 

Now, onto the Rotem Bill.  The bill, sponsored by Yisrael Beiteynu, a secular party that represents the large Russian immigrant population, gives authority to more localized non-Haredi Orthodox rabbis to formally convert Jews, thus opening the door to solve the problem of hundreds of thousands of citizens who have a difficult time converting because they are not Haredim.  What do the Haredim get out of this?  More power.  The bill gives them the power to become the sole arbiter for the State on all things Jewish.  This bill seems to be a political trade between the government and the Haredi leadership.  It solves one problem but to many of us, it creates another one.

The reason more liberal Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist denominations are upset about this is because this newfound power for the Haredi community could potentially lead the State of Israel down a path in which the only people who will be granted citizenship are those considered Jewish by the Haredi community.  Essentially, all conversions by non Orthodox rabbis and some by Modern Orthodox rabbis may be unrecognized by the state of Israel, and as such, these individuals will not be able to become citizens of the State of Israel.  World Jewry is left to guess whether or not this will happen, and from a Conservative Jewish perspective, this is too important to leave to “trust.”  It is for this reason that so many “movements” have been upset by this bill.  On a positive note, it is because of the reaction of Diaspora Jewry that this bill was temporarily tabled.  This is a promising sign that suggests that we have a voice about what happens in the Jewish State.  It certainly complicates matters from a domestic perspective, but if the State of Israel is really a state for all Jews, then the fact that the government “listens” to the feedback of Diaspora Jewry is hopeful to those of us who live here but care so deeply about the future of Israel.