ROCHESTER — A grandson of Mahatma Gandhi resigned from a peace institute based at the University of Rochester after drawing condemnation for asserting that “Israel and the Jews are the biggest players” in a global culture of violence and “can overplay” the Holocaust for sympathy.

The fifth grandson of the revered pacifist, Arun Gandhi, said today the board of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence had accepted his offer a day earlier to step down as president.

Mr. Gandhi co-founded the institute with his wife, Sunanda, at Christian Brothers University in Memphis in 1991 and relocated it to the University of Rochester campus in June, a few months after her death at age 74.

The school declined immediate comment on the controversy, saying the institute’s board “is separate from the university.” Its president, Joel Seligman, said earlier this month that he was “surprised and deeply disappointed” by Mr. Gandhi’s comments.

Mr. Gandhi wrote in an online Washington Post forum on January 7 that Jewish identity “has been locked into the holocaust experience — a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of (how) a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends.

“The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. … The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on, the regret turns into anger.”

Describing Israel as “a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs,” Mr. Gandhi asked whether it would “not be better to befriend those who hate you?”

“Apparently, in the modern world so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept,” he wrote. “You don’t befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.”

Mr. Gandhi was on a panel of scholars, writers, and clergy who discuss a new topic weekly on the Post’s “On Faith” page and his comments drew a torrent of criticism, much of it unfavorable.

Mr. Gandhi later apologized “for my poorly worded post,” saying he shouldn’t have implied that Israeli government policies reflected the views of all Jewish people.

“I do believe that when a people hold on to historic grievances too firmly it can lead to bitterness and the loss of support from those who would be friends,” he wrote in a follow-up.

While emphasizing that Jewish suffering, particularly in the Holocaust, “was historic in its proportions” and that “it is also important not to forget the past, lest we fail to learn from it,” he stood by his criticism of “the use of violence by recent Israeli governments.

“I have criticized the governments of the U.S., India, and China in much the same way,” he said, adding that “I want to correct statements that I made with insufficient care, and that have inflicted unnecessary hurt and caused anger.”

In the fall, Mr. Gandhi’s institute began offering courses, workshops and seminars focusing on the theory and practice of nonviolence.

Its research library contains multiple photographs, audio, and videotapes, and 100 volumes of writings by his grandfather, who led India to independence in 1947 and was assassinated by a Hindu hard-liner in January 1948.

Mr. Gandhi and his wife had moved to Rochester in 2004 to be closer to their daughter and her family.