An installation in downtown Munich commemorating the Feb. 13, 1970, arson attack on a Jewish community center in which seven elderly people died. Photo: @springermunich/X

Law enforcement in Germany has reopened a long-dormant investigation into the 1970 arson attack on a Jewish community center in the city of Munich that killed seven elderly residents, according to German media.

“On Jan. 31, 2025, the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation into the arson attack on the Israelite Religious Community’s nursing home,” senior prosecutor Andreas Franck told the German tabloid newspaper Bild last week.

Franck, who also serves as the antisemitism commissioner of the Bavarian judiciary, will be leading the probe. He was recently contacted by a witness with new and “credible” information about possible perpetrators, Bild reported.

Fifty-five years later, the long-forgotten Feb. 13, 1970, attack, which took place during a wave of terrorism against Israeli and Jewish targets, remains unsolved.

One week before the arson, Palestinian terrorists opened fire on passengers lined up for a flight to Tel Aviv at Munich Airport, killing one person and injuring 23.

According to a report from German police at the time, the Palestinian terrorist organization that claimed responsibility for the Munich Airport attack denied any involvement in the fire at the Jewish community center.

On the night of the arson attack, unknown individuals set fire to a four-story building that housed a community center, a retirement home, and a synagogue, with 50 people inside, leaving 13 injured. Police later ruled the attack as arson after finding a gasoline can in the stairwell.

Five men and two women were killed in the attack: Regina Rivka Becher (59), David Jakubowicz (59), Rosa Drucker (59), Georg Eljakim Pfau (63), Leopold Arie Leib Gimpel (69), Siegfried Offenbacher (71), and Meir Max Blum (71). Among the victims, Jakubowicz and Pfau were survivors of Nazi concentration camps.

In 2012, fresh evidence suggested that the attack may have been carried out by an anti-Zionist anarchist group. However, Munich prosecutors later determined that the information was “inaccurate.”

In 2013, an anonymous source claimed in an article for the German magazine Focus that a member of the far-left extremist group Tupamaros West-Berlin (TW) was responsible for the attack. The investigation was closed in November 2017.

At the time of the arson, the West German government offered a reward of 75,000 marks ($20,500) for information leading to the capture of the arsonists responsible for the atrocity.

Then-West German President Gustav Heinemann condemned the attack, saying he was especially outraged because the victims had already endured immense suffering in their lives.