He's The Male Marjorie Traitor Greene
I visited St Petersburg in 2016 and while there I went to the Grand Choral Synagogue, where my grandfather, as a teenager, was on the night before left Russia in 1905 after a series of pograms had killed thousands of Jews across Russia including small Ukrainian villages like the one his family lived in. When he got to St Petersburg to board a ship for America, the synagogue was 12 years old and the second largest synagogue in Europe. He wasn't any more religious than I am but he had never been in a grand building of any kind before. He was one of 12 brothers and sisters. He and one other brother were admitted to the U.S. The rest of them all had to find someplace else and they settled in northeast Brazil. As a result, I have more family in Recife and Salvador than I do in the U.S., although some of them have moved to São Paulo. I’ve only met a few of them when I was very young and they visited the world’s fair in New York.
There are around 120,000 Jews in Brazil virtually all of them descendants of Jews fleeing European persecution, from from the inquisition in Spain and Portugal and later fleeing from German and Russian pogroms, like my grandfather. I’ve been following the drama around MAGA Republican congressman-elect George Santos— who was at the Trump riot on Jan. 6 and claims Trump won the 2020 election— and his fake bio. He’s blaming his troubles on Democrats who, he claims, are afraid of him because he’s a gay immigrant. But the Democrats never found all his lies. The NY Times investigated and found he lied about working at Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup; he lied about going to NYU and Baruch College; he lied about where he lived; he lied about founding an animal rescue group and… he basically lied about everything in his bio. And then yesterday, The Forward reported that his whole origin story was bullshit too.
Andrew Silverstein reported that his “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.” He 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.”
If she was Jewish should would be the only Fatima who was. Fatima was Mohammed’s daughter and thought of as the ideal Muslim woman. Fatima, unrelated to Mohammed’s daughter, in Catholic tradition is also a title for an apparition of Jesus' mother, Mary.
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.”
According to Matt Brooks, the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Santos says “he identifies as Jewish [and] 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… 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.”
Silverstein further reported that “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.”
On Monday, writing for the same paper, Ron Kampeas also reported that Santos was lying about being Jewish. He also noted that “Santos faces outstanding charges in Brazil for allegedly stealing a checkbook from a man in the care of his mother, a nurse, and then cashing checks, according to the New York Times’ report. He has twice been evicted. His financial reporting as a candidate is missing required information, omissions that could bring legal jeopardy. The Times sought Santos out at the address where he is registered to vote; the person there said she did not know him.” I guess that's because he's a Florida resident. I wonder if he's really gay. He assumed Zimmerman's religion; did he also assume his sexual identity!
Ben Jacobs, reporting for Vox yesterday, noted that Santos hasn’t denied any of the allegations, just had his attorney call them “defamatory.” Jacobs also noted that though Santos didn’t work at the financial firms he claimed to have worked at, he did work for Harbor City Capital, which has been named a Ponzi scheme by the SEC. “But most importantly,” he wrote, “we don’t know where Santos’s money comes from. The Representative-elect loaned his own campaign $700,000 during the 2022 cycle and claimed an income of $750,000. He also listed millions of dollars in assets including an apartment in Rio De Janeiro worth up to $1 million and a seven-figure savings account. It’s a major shift in fortune for someone who was evicted twice, in 2015 and 2017, for failing to pay rent. Even in 2020, he reported income in only one category— compensation in excess of $5,000 paid by one source— with no other assets.” Holy, Mary mother of God! No wonder he likes Trump so much; he’s just like him!
Jacobs wrote that “Dan Goldman, a fellow representative-elect from New York and a former prosecutor, has suggested that Santos face criminal investigation for conspiracy to defraud the United States as well as filing false statements to the Federal Election Commission… As unsustainable as the current status quo might seem, the only impetus right now for Santos to resign would be a sense of shame, and it seems unlikely that he carries that burden.”