ROCHESTER, N.Y. – A grandson of Mahatma Gandhi has resigned from a peace institute at the University of Rochester after drawing condemnation for asserting in an online forum that "Israel and the Jews are the biggest players" in a global culture of violence and "can overplay" the Holocaust for sympathy.
Arun Gandhi, the fifth grandson of the revered pacifist, says the board of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence accepted his offer Thursday to step down as president.
Gandhi co-founded the institute with his wife, Sunanda, at Christian Brothers University in Memphis in 1991 and moved it to the Rochester campus in June, a few months after her death at age 74. The couple relocated to Rochester in 2004 to be closer to their daughter and her family.
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