Yechiel Leiter, a Scranton, Pa.-born former aide to Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, will be Israel’s next ambassador to the U.S., the Prime Minister’s Office announced on Friday.

Leiter is expected to arrive in Washington in January, when Ambassador Mike Herzog’s term, which was extended from the end of this year to Jan. 20, concludes.

Netanyahu called Leiter “a highly talented diplomat, an eloquent speaker, who has a deep understanding of American culture and politics. I am convinced that Yechiel will represent the State of Israel in the best possible way, and I wish him success in his position.”

Leiter served as Netanyahu’s chief of staff when he was finance minister, and as an aide to Sharon in the Knesset and in the Education Ministry.

More recently, Leiter has been affiliated with numerous right-leaning organizations in Israel, including the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and the Kohelet Forum.

Leiter, a resident of the West Bank settlement Eli, grew up in Pennsylvania and moved to Israel at age 18 to serve in the IDF. He is an ordained rabbi, has a doctorate in political philosophy and has written several books.

Netanyahu brought Leiter as his guest to his speech to a joint session of Congress in July, and paid tribute to his son Moshe, who died in combat in Gaza last year. 

“With us today is Yechiel Leiter, the father of one of those Maccabees,” Netanyahu said. “Yehiel’s father escaped the Holocaust and found refuge in America. As a young man, Yechiel moved to Israel and raised a family of eight children. He named his eldest son Moshe after his late father. Moshe became an exemplary officer in one of our elite commando units. He served with distinction for two decades while raising six beautiful children of his own.”

“On Oct. 7,” the prime minister added, “Moshe volunteered to return to combat. Four weeks later, he was killed when a booby-trap mine exploded in a tunnel shaft right next to a Mosque. At his son’s funeral, Yechiel said this: ‘If the State of Israel had not been established after the Holocaust, the image engraved in our collective memory would have been the photograph of that helpless Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto holding his hands up in the air with Nazi rifles pointed at him. But because of the birth of Israel, because of the courage of soldiers like my son Moshe, the Jewish people are no longer helpless in the face of our enemies.’”

Leiter also had a message for President Joe Biden in his eulogy for his son, referring to their shared Scranton background and calling on him to “cease and desist” his “pressure on Israel to hold off, to cease the offensive” in Gaza.

Moshe “gave his life so the barbarians wouldn’t get through the gates of our democracies, of our Judeo-Christian Western values,” he said.

Leiter will have to give up his U.S. citizenship to serve as an Israeli ambassador.