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News


CONGRESSMAN-ELECT GEORGE SANTOS LIED ABOUT GRANDPARENTS FLEEING ANTI-JEWISH
PERSECUTION DURING WWII

Genealogy websites show his mother’s parents were born in Brazil, not Ukraine or
Belgium, as his campaign website stated
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A photo of Leonard Antoine Horta Devolder and his family in Brazil. Courtesy of
Gea Sierdsma via Geneanet

By Andrew Silverstein December 21, 2022

Congressman-elect George Santos’ emotional narrative of having Jewish
grandparents who fled Europe during World War II appears to be untrue, like much
of the rest of his campaign biography, according to genealogy websites reviewed
by the Forward.

Santos, a Long Island Republican, has said that his father was Catholic and his
mother was Jewish, and that both faiths “are mine.” The very first line of the
“About George” page on his campaign website states: “George’s grandparents fled
Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution
during WWII.”

But the website myheritage.com lists Santos’ maternal grandparents as having
both been born in Brazil before the Nazis rose to power — his grandfather, Paulo
Horta Devolder, in 1918, and his grandmother, Rosalina Caruso Horta Devolder, in
Rio, in 1927. An online obituary for Santos’ mother, Fatima Aziza Caruso Horta
Devolder, who died in 2016, says she was born in Niterói, a suburb of Rio de
Janeiro, on Dec. 22, 1962, to Paul and Rosalina Devolder.


A Christian image from the Facebook page of George Santos’ late mother, Fatima
Aziza Caruso Horta Devolder. Courtesy of Facebook

Fatima’s own Facebook page, which has photos of her with Santos and tags his
page, has no mentions of the words “Jew” or “Jewish,” nor the terms Yom Kippur,
Shabbat or Israel in English or Portuguese. But four of the seven pages she
“liked” were for Catholic groups, and another was for a Brazilian priest and
singer.

She regularly shared posts with Catholic themes and images of Jesus, including
one eight months before her death from a Brazilian Christian group, Tarde com
Maria (Afternoons with Maria), that says in Portuguese: “The cross of Christ for
some is a symbol of defeat, for us it is a symbol of salvation.” Another adapts
a quote from Genesis, “There’s an angel today, delivering from all evil.”



A chorus of constituents and government watchdogs have called for Santos to step
aside or for Congress to refuse to seat him in January since a blockbuster New
York Times investigation on Monday reporting that much of his storybook
biography appears to have been made up. The Times said that neither Baruch
College, which Santos said he was graduated from in 2010, nor Citigroup and
Goldman Sachs, where Santos said he had worked, had any record of him.

A Christian image from the Facebook page of George Santos’ late mother, Fatima
Aziza Caruso Horta Devolder. Courtesy of Facebook

Even the animal rescue group he said he founded does not appear to exist.

A lawyer for Santos dismissed the report as a “shotgun blast of attacks” and
“defamatory allegations.” He then repeated a common misattribution to Winston
Churchill of a line that originated in an 1845 essay by Victor Hugo: “You have
enemies? Good. It means that you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your
life.”

Congressman-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) speaking at the Republican Jewish
Coalition Annual Leadership Meeting in Nevada. Photo by Wade Vandervort/AFP via
Getty Images

Santos’ campaign did not respond to the Forward’s email inquiries on Tuesday
regarding the false statements about his grandparents’ birthplaces and
backgrounds. On Monday, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Santos did
not return emails sent to multiple addresses or messages sent through a number
of social media platforms, and that his sister and lawyer also did not reply to
email messages.

Matt Brooks, head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said the RJC “is aware of
the claims being made against Congressman-elect George Santos, and we have
reached out to his office directly to ascertain whether they are true. These
allegations, if true, are deeply troubling. Given their seriousness, the
Congressman-elect owes the public an explanation, and we look forward to hearing
it.”



Santos, who is 34, made history in November as the first openly gay Republican
to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, beating the Democrat, Robert Zimmerman,
by 8 percentage points. His district, which spans much of Nassau County and some
of Queens, is about 20% Jewish.

“That he would actually lie about the Holocaust to try to promote himself, it’s
not offensive — it’s sick and obscene,” Zimmerman said Wednesday after
revelations about Santos’ heritage were published. “It’s one of the most vile
things you can do, to actually use one of the world’s greatest tragedies, the
death of 6 million, as a political stunt.”

Zimmerman said he hopes the U.S. Department of Justice, the House Ethics
Committee and other forces will intervene to keep Santos from serving in
Congress, but he declined to say whether he himself would run again if there
were a special election to fill the seat.

Santos joined a Republican Jewish Coalition candle-lighting ceremony on Long
Island Sunday night alongside outgoing Rep. Lee Zeldin, and last month was a
featured speaker at the RJC’s convention in Las Vegas, billed as one of two
freshmen Jewish Republicans. (The other is Ohio’s Max Miller.) He campaigned
heavily among Orthodox Jews, and after a Chabad event on Nov. 3, tweeted, “It
was an honor to address fellow members of the Jewish community in #NY03.”

In an interview with Jewish Insider, Santos described himself as a non-observant
Jew, and said his four visits to Israel were “the most exciting experiences” of
his life. He talked about spending Shabbat and going to synagogue with Persian
Jews in Great Neck, and said he would treat all constituents fairly regardless
of their backgrounds.

George Santos’ portrait is one of the “liked” images on the Facebook page of his
late mother, Fatima Aziza Caruso Horta Devolder. Courtesy of Facebook

“Whether my mother’s Jewish background beliefs, which are mine, or my father’s
Roman Catholic beliefs, which are also mine, are represented or not,” he said,
“I want to represent everyone else that practices every other religion to make
sure everybody feels like they have a partner in me.”

But it appears Santos is not Jewish — and lied about his family fleeing
persecution during the war.

Neither of his maternal grandparents appear in Brazilian immigration cards in
the 1930s or 1940s, or in the databases of Yad Vashem or the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, which list European Jewish refugees.

Yet Santos has repeatedly and publicly proclaimed to be descended from
survivors, responding to a critic on Twitter back in 2020: “You pulled the Nazi
card on the grandson of Holocaust refugees.”

Rosalina’s parents, Vicente Caruso and Alzira Sant’anna Caruso, were both born
in Brazil, according to myheritage.com, as was Paulo’s mother, Maria Victória
Alexandra Horta Da Fonseca. But Paulo’s father — George Santos’
great-grandfather — Leonard Antoine (Ludovicus Thomas) Horta Devolder, was an
engineer born in Belgium, in 1863. A 1954 article in the Rio newspaper Correio
da Manha (Morning Mail) states that Leonard Antione immigrated to Brazil in 1884
and later founded a school in the city of Petrópolis. Leonard and his wife,
Maria, are also listed in 1928 church records of the marriage of their daughter.

Santos may be named after him: His full name is George Anthony Devolder Santos.

A second family tree on the French genealogy website Geneanet, created by Gea
Sierdsma, a distant Dutch relative of Santos, corroborates Paulo’s parentage and
birthplace. This tree includes several photographs of Leonard the engineer, and
the group shot at the top of this article. Sierdsma, who researched the family’s
lineage in archives in Antwerp, confirmed by email that the family does not have
Ukrainian or Jewish roots.


RELATED

 * Congressman-elect George Santos campaigned as a Jewish Republican. Was he
   lying?

___

Forward political reporter Jacob Kornbluh contributed to this story.





Andrew Silverstein is a New York-based freelance writer and the co-founder of
Streetwise New York Tours.




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PERSECUTION DURING WWII

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