“I’m Latino, I’m gay, I’m Jewish. I do what I want. I don’t fit in the boxes that they want me to fit in.” So said George Santos—recently elected as the congressman for a district that includes parts of Long Island and Queens—during a campaign interview in August. But since his election, reporters have uncovered several holes in Santos’s claims about his background and finances. Matthew Kassel scrutinizes the stories the thirty-four-year-old Republican has told about his ancestry:
In his campaign materials and on the trail, George Santos, . . . wove a compelling family narrative, tracing his maternal grandparents’ flight from Jewish persecution in Soviet Ukraine to Belgium, where, he has claimed, they fled the Nazi occupation before settling in Brazil.
Brazilian records from a national civil-identification database . . . reveal that Santos’s maternal grandmother, Rosalina Caruso Horta Devolder, was born in 1927, and is unlikely to have immigrated from Belgium in 1940, as Santos has previously claimed. . . . It is likely that both Santos’s grandmother and her mother . . . were born in Brazil. His maternal grandfather, Paulo Horta Devolder, was, “by all indications, Brazilian,” according to Fábio Koifman, a historian at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro who specializes in the entry of foreigners into Brazil between 1937 and 1945.
While his story has varied on the different occasions he has told it, Santos has most frequently said his grandfather, who was born in 1918, escaped Stalin’s persecution when he fled Ukraine in the 1920s, and met the woman who would become his wife in Belgium. But Koifman, who recently assembled an extensive genealogical record of Santos’s family, . . . said there is “no evidence that he was born in Ukraine or that he was Belgian or came from Belgium.”
Meanwhile, none of Santos’s maternal ancestors “suggest any closeness to Judaism,” Koifman said. “All were baptized, married, and buried according to Catholic rites and traditions.” Though he has described himself as a practicing Catholic, the congressman-elect expressed a personal sense of connection to his purported Jewish heritage.
Read more on Jewish Insider: https://jewishinsider.com/2022/12/george-santos-republican-congress-jewish-long-island-brazil-family/