Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida at the State of the Union on February 7, 2023.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna may have misrepresented her religious background.
She says she was raised as a Messianic Jew by her father, but relatives dispute that.
Luna also claims to be Hispanic, but registered to vote as “White, not of Hispanic origin” in 2015.
Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida may have misrepresented her religious background and only recently began identifying as Hispanic, according to a new report from the Washington Post.
Luna, elected last year to Congress to represent Florida’s 13th congressional district in St. Petersburg, said in an interview with Jewish Insider in November that her father raised her as a Messianic Jew — a Jewish person who believes that Jesus is the Messiah.
“I was raised as a Messianic Jew by my father,” said Luna, defending the fact that she was endorsed by far-right Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who’s been accused of making anti-Semitic remarks. “I am also a small fraction Ashkenazi. If she were antisemitic, why did she endorse me?”
But according to three relatives who spoke with the Post, her father, George Mayerhofer, was Catholic, and they were unaware of him practicing any form of Judaism.
Monica Luna, the congresswoman’s mother, told the Post that George Mayerhofer was a “Christian that embraced the Messianic faith” and that the congresswoman “buried him to Jewish customs.”
Immigration records reviewed by The Post showed that the congresswoman’s paternal grandfather — Heinrich Mayerhofer — identified as a Roman Catholic when he immigrated to Canada from Germany in 1954. According to several other family members who spoke with The Post, Heinrich Mayerhofer served in the armed forces of Nazi Germany when he was a teenager in the 1940s.
One relative, Jolanta Mayerhofer, told the Post that Heinrich Mayerhofer had no choice in the matter.
“It hurt for him to talk about it,” she said. “He said, ‘You getting the letter, you need to show up, otherwise your life is over. … He did not like it, but that’s what life was.”
The congresswoman, born with the last name “Mayerhofer,” also began to embrace her Hispanic heritage more publicly only in recent years. When she registered to vote in Florida in 2015, she identified as “White, not of Hispanic origin.” She updated her ethnicity to “Hispanic” when she re-registered to vote in Washington State in 2019.
“I would like to represent my Hispanic heritage and have the same last name as my mother,” she wrote in a petition she filed in 2019 to change her last name to Luna.
Monica Luna told the Post that the congresswoman has “never not identified as being Hispanic as far as I know” and that Luna’s father spoke Spanish around her when she was a child.
“Anna can check both boxes,” she told The Post. “She’s bicultural and biracial. It’s not easy to figure out what box to choose.”
Luna did not respond to the Post’s requests for comment. Reached for comment by Insider, Luna’s congressional office said they will release a full response later on Friday. In a series of tweets, Luna has disputed other aspects of the Post’s reporting.
—Anna Paulina Luna (@VoteAPL) February 10, 2023
On Capitol Hill, Luna has been among the furthest-right members of the Republican conference, joining several other lawmakers in initially opposing Kevin McCarthy’s bid for House speaker.
She is also one of the few Republicans who has continued to be friendly with scandal-plagued Rep. George Santos of New York, who notably also lied about being Jewish — later claiming to the New York Post that he was simply calling himself “Jew-ish.”
—Aaron Fritschner (@Fritschner) February 7, 2023