Incoming Rep.-elect George Santos, R-N.Y. has been plagued by scandal in recent days after a New York Times report found that he fabricated his entire academic and professional resume.
Now a new report from independent Jewish publication Forward has added yet another scandal to Santos' plate, as he appears to not even be Jewish.
During his campaign for Congress, Santos claimed to be the grandson of Ukrainian Jews who fled persecution in World War II and settled in Brazil.
However, Forward did extensive research on Santos' family history and could find no evidence at all that his grandparents were Jews -- and it also found that they settled in Brazil long before World War II broke out.
"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," the publication reports. "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."
In addition to this, the publication has found no evidence that Santos' mother at all identifies as Jewish.
"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," the publication explains. "But four of the seven pages she "liked" were for Catholic groups, and... 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.'"
