Former Jewish Home leader Professor Danial Hershkowitz will likely be nominated by Prime Minister Netanyahu to oversee the Civil Service Commission.
The influential post would make the Religious Zionist academic responsible for all of Israel's civil servants. Hershkowitz would have to be vetted by a special committee headed by retired Judge Hanan Efrati.
Born in Haifa, Hershkowitz earned his BSc, MSc and DSc, all from the Technion. He studied at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem and received his ordination in 1995.
Hershkowitz has published over 80 mathematics articles in academic journals. He was President of the International Linear Algebra Society and has served as a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is currently the president of Bar Ilan University.
Alongside his academic pursuits, Hershkowitz has served as rabbi of the Ahuza neighborhood in Haifa. In 2008, he became the head of the Bayit Yehudi party and was appointed Minister of Science and Technology in 2009, when the party joined Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition, a position he held until being replaced by current leader Naftali Bennett in 2012.