Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan called on Columbia President Minouche Shafik not to remain passive in the face of anti-Israel protests at her university in a letter on Friday.

Dayan wrote that the presidency of Columbia University is “one of the most important leadership positions in the academic world” and added that the person in that role was a leader and not an administrator.

“All the decisions you recently made were administrative in nature: to call the NYPD to evacuate the illegal encampment, to allow its re-establishment, to activate or deactivate credentials, to move to online teaching. Even your decision to negotiate is administrative in nature,” he wrote in the letter, which was also published on X.

He added that it was time for Shafik to make “leadership decisions” and thereby lead both academically and morally.

“When thousands of Columbia faculty, staff and students call for the elimination of the State of Israel and the abolition of Zionism, you must take a stand,” Dayan wrote. “When it becomes crystal clear that abolishing the existence of the Jewish state is a prevalent ideology in Columbia, the president of the institution cannot remain silent.”

Dayan emphasized that it was important for Shafik to deal not only with the anti-Israel protesters’ behavior, but also with their message, likening them to the Ku Klux Klan and saying that “a moral leader will fight both [a polite KKK member and a thuggish one] with the same determination.”

The time has come, he wrote, for Shafik to decide whether “the elimination of Israel – with or without the genocide of its Jewish population” could be a “legitimate cause advanced in academic syllabi, lectures, events, demonstrations and encampments in Columbia University.”

“Each day, each hour you evade making a public decision of this nature and acting accordingly, you actually decide affirmatively,” he told her.

“There is a naive belief that academy is immune to bigotry and the causes that students and professors lead are inherently ‘good causes,’ even if sometimes ahead of their time,” Dayan continued.

Dayan presented Heidelberg University, which was “no less prestigious than Columbia,” as an example where this was not the case.

He described how the German university was “a center of liberal thinking” in the 1920s, but a decade later, a mob of its students took part in antisemitic book burnings and its faculty began to promote “race theory, eugenics and forced euthanasia.”

“Heidelberg did have administrators. Unfortunately, it lacked moral leadership,” Dayan wrote.

“The Jewish People was dispersed for two millennia, subject to persecutions, forced conversions, discriminations, pogroms, and finally, the extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust,” he added, saying that it was up to Shafik whether Columbia would be “remembered as Heidelberg” by “pursuing the destruction and erasure of the Jewish state.”

Dayan ended his letter by quoting Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel’s saying that indifference is “the most insidious danger of all,” as well as the words of Wiesel’s fellow Nobelist Martin Luther King Jr. that “the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.”

“A great moral conflict was delivered to your doorstep,” Dayan wrote. “Rise to the occasion. Lead with moral principles, not only administrative regulations. Speak up.”

The letter was sent to Shafik as anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests flared up in recent weeks with encampments set up on Columbia’s campus to demonstrate against the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Jewish students were recommended to stay home and classes were moved online following calls at the protest for the elimination of Israel and the repetition of Hamas’s October 7 attack, in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 253.

Over 100 students were arrested last week when the NYPD was called in to shut down the encampment, however, another one was set up again this week. Shafik called for it to be removed on Tuesday before giving protest leaders a Thursday deadline to come to agreements with representatives from the university.

Ahead of the deadline, some protesters voluntarily removed their tents, but returned after the deadline passed.