Suffolk Closeup: Israeli Ambassador Visits Suffolk County

Israel’s ambassador to the United States came to Suffolk County last week and made a presentation. Yechiel (Michael) Leiter was born in 1959 in the U.S., in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father, he related to a packed audience at The Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton, came to the U.S. in 1938, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria.

When his father arrived in the U.S., said Leiter, opening his presentation, he had “a crusty piece of bread in one pocket, a quarter in the other pocket.” Leiter said he thought about this while in the Oval Office of the White House shortly after being named Israeli ambassador to the U.S. in January 2025.

As a youth, Leiter studied at the Rabbinical Seminary of America in Kew Gardens Hills in Queens. At 18, he emigrated to Israel, where he subsequently would be ordained a rabbi.

In Israel, too, his studies included receiving a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Haifa. Back in the U.S., he received a Master of Arts in international relations from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

He served in the Israeli government as deputy director general of the Ministry of Education, a political advisor to a member of the Knesset and chief of staff in the Ministry of Finance.

He served in the Israel Defense Forces as a combat medic.

Here last week, Leiter spoke with emotion about his oldest child, his son, Dr. Moshe Leiter, a 39-year-old physician and father of six who was a reserve major leading a commando unit in the Gaza Strip and was killed on November 10, 2023. The unit entered a “booby-trapped” building, he said, with “a mosque on one side, a medical clinic on the other.” His son died with two other soldiers, and three nearby “lost legs.”

Hamas, in its invasion of Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis were murdered, “jumped the gun,” he said. That was “not the plan,” which, said Leiter, involved forming what its enemies called a “ring of fire” around Israel, with Hamas and Hezbollah from Lebanon and others moving simultaneously.

“That was the plan,” said Leiter.

But “this generation is the greatest generation of Jews that ever lived,” he said. And when Hamas attacked, amid the “command breakdown, thousands of them went into the line of fire” with their private vehicles and weapons, preventing the attackers from moving further.

“We’ve had to change our security doctrine after October 7th,” said the ambassador. “We will not allow jihadists of any kind on our borders.”

Meanwhile, he spoke of the nuclear threat to Israel. With Israel having won “all conventional wars” waged against it, Iran has been scheming nuclear war—and until the attack by Israel and the U.S. on nuclear facilities in Iran, it could have been “weeks away from nuclear.”

“Our aim is the denuclearization of Iran,” said the ambassador, and for “Iran not to have nuclear weapons—today, next year or forever.”

Leiter received a standing ovation from the audience.