JOHANNESBURG (JTA) — South African President Nelson Mandela has joined religious and political leaders in condemning the recent firebombing of a Jewish home in Cape Town.

"I wish to reassure the Jewish community that the government is sensitive to its concerns regarding the terrible bomb attack which took place in Cape Town," Mandela wrote in a letter to Marlene Bethlehem, national chairperson of the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies.

"The government condemns this act and all other actions which disturb the harmony of our society. We appeal to all our citizens to live together in peace and to respect the religious convictions of all communities."

On July 14, gasoline bombs were thrown at the home of Ivan Maron, an observant Jew who operates a Jewish book center. An estimated $50,000 in damage was caused to the home, which was left uninhabitable.

It took place days after a crowd of Muslims marched on the Israeli Embassy in Cape Town shouting anti-Semitic slogans such as "One Zionist, One Bullet!"

Dutch woman aims to start Nazi museum

AMSTERDAM (JTA) — The woman known here as the "Black Widow" is planning to turn her villa in the Dutch town of Velp into a museum for the glorification of Nazism.

Florentine Rost van Tonningen-Heubel, 83, has the pillars outside her spacious home painted black and red, the colors of the Nazi flag. Large candles inside the home are decorated with swastikas.

The interior of her villa contains busts, photographs and portraits of Adolf Hitler and other top Nazi officials, including her late husband, Rost van Tonningen, a Dutch Nazi who committed suicide in 1945.

Nazism was a "system of honesty, reliability and ethics," she recently told Dutch journalist Jack Kooistra.

Officials from the Amsterdam-based Anne Frank Foundation believe that the authorities will intervene if the museum is ever established, because propagating Nazism is prohibited under Dutch law.