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How this Jewish refugee became Times Square’s queen of porn
(New York Jewish Week) — “She was the most un-grandma person that anyone could have,” says David Bourla at the beginning of a film about his one-of-a-kind grandmother, Chelly Wilson. “Except for the fact that she was Jewish, we celebrated Christmas in a porn theater. It doesn’t get any weirder than that.”
So begins Valerie Kontakos’ documentary, “Queen of the Deuce,” which tells the unlikely story of how a tough-as-nails Jewish lesbian narrowly escaped the Holocaust in Greece and became the successful owner of several pornographic movie theaters in New York City in the the 1970s. The documentary, which premieres in New York on Friday, Nov. 11, is one of several Jewish films playing the documentary film festival DOC NYC, which runs this year from Nov. 9 through Nov. 27.
Born in 1908, Wilson grew up in a religious Sephardic family in Thessaloniki — also known as Salonika in Judeo-Spanish — and was ambitious from a young age. “She had this fierce desire to achieve something,” said Kontakos. “When she was younger, she wanted to be a doctor. But of course that wasn’t an option for her at that point, and given her circumstances, given the fact that she was a Jewish Sephardic woman in Salonika. She came from a very conservative community.”
Relying on a mix of archival footage, interviews and animated sequences, “Queen of the Deuce” is a wide-ranging look at Wilson’s improbable life: her various business ventures, her marriages to men and romances with women, the pain of the loss of her family and more. Central to the film are Wilson’s now-grown grandchildren, who describe their unconventional Jewish grandmother as tough and eccentric, with the confident body language of a mob boss. (Wilson, who died in 1994, appears in the film through home videos.)
As a young woman, Wilson left Athens just before the outbreak of World War II, narrowly escaping the devastating destruction of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community. According to Yad Vashem, out of the approximate 56,000 Jews who lived in Thessaloniki before the war, some 54,000 were killed in the Holocaust.
Wilson got her start in New York selling hot dogs and soda. She sent some of her earnings to Greece to buy newsreel footage and turned the footage into a film called “Greece on the March” — an effort to raise money in the U.S. for the Greek war effort against the Germans. When she played the film at a New York movie theater she met a Jewish film projectionist named Rex Wilson. Although they lacked a common language, he became her second husband.
“He was nice,” Wilson says of Rex in her husky, accented voice. “He provided me with cigarettes.”
(Her first husband, whom she divorced after having two children, Paulette and Dino, was the product of an arranged marriage in Greece. Wilson compares his kisses to “torture” in the film. Later in her life, after Wilson and her second husband split up, her preference for women became an open secret.)
From there, Wilson fell into the movie theater business — first “regular” movies, and then, by the late 1960s, sensing opportunity, she became the owner of several adult movie theaters. Many of them were located on 42nd Street, nicknamed “the Deuce,” which was New York’s infamously gritty red light district at the time.
“It’s unusual not to be surprised by something that she did,” said Kontakos, who first met Wilson in the early 1970s when, as a teenager, she worked at the Wilsons’ Tivoli Theatre on 8th Avenue. “It showed Greek films on Sundays, which were PG, completely family material. The rest of the week they would show porn.”
“Times Square [in the ‘70s] was like the underworld,” added Kontakos, whose family is Greek though not Jewish. “You had drugs there, prostitution, and then you had porn. It was really quite extreme.”
The Adonis Theater marquee, as seen in “Queen of the Deuce.” (Courtesy of the Wilson family)
Wilson was, by all accounts, an exceptionally tough character — she rarely smiled, and usually had a cigarette or a cigar in hand. She frequently held court reclining on the sofa of her living room — her Times Square apartment was above the Eros, a gay porn theater that opened in 1962 — with bags of cash in the corner. Wilson also owned the Adonis, an all-male adult theater so legendary for cruising that it became the locale for a meta, well-known 1978 gay porno film “A Night at the Adonis.”
In family footage shown in the film, she puffs a cigarette and tells stories in imperfect, Greek-accented English of how she smuggled her children to New York from Palestine and Greece. “I had Dino stolen from Israel, you know?” she says, reclining on her couch in a red silk robe. The story that unfolds is an improbable one, involving secret boat rides, misbehaving children and a chance encounter with a sympathetic official in Athens.
Similar to the fate of Thessaloniki’s Jews, most of Wilson’s family died in the Holocaust. But her shrewdness had saved Paulette: Before she departed for the United States in 1939, Wilson left her daughter in the care of a non-Jewish Greek family — with the specific instructions not to turn her over to her Jewish relatives, even if they came looking for her (which, of course, they did).
Still, Wilson kept her difficult past mostly hidden from her children and grandchildren. And in the film’s interviews, her offspring express the pain of their lost family and histories. They remember that Wilson refused to seek out reparations for her murdered family, saying it was blood money.
For Kontakos, it was important to tell this Holocaust story well, noting that the history the persecution of Greek Jews isn’t as well known as other European Jews. “I do feel it’s still not really discussed as openly as it should be,” she said.
Though Wilson may not have been the warm, nurturing type, she had a fierce dedication to her family, and her children and grandchildren reminisce in the film about her creative spirit and zest for life. Kontakos hopes audiences walk away from the film with a sense of “the joy of life, regardless of the hardships,” she said.
“Queen of the Deuce” is screening in New York on Friday, Nov. 11 and Saturday, Nov. 12 as part of the DOC NYC film festival, and will be available for online streaming Nov. 12 through Nov. 27. For details, click here.
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The post How this Jewish refugee became Times Square’s queen of porn appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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What Jackson, Mississippi’s only synagogue means to its city — in the wake of arson, and beyond
When Beth Israel Congregation was dedicated in Jackson, Mississippi, in the summer of 1875, the occasion was marked with a procession that began in front of City Hall.
A local paper reported that the synagogue was so crowded that many were unable to gain admission. Visitors had come from all over the South: Vicksburg, Canton, New Orleans, Memphis, and beyond. Christians were present and explicitly welcomed. The service concluded with an elegant supper and a ball at Angelo’s Hall on Capitol Street, a venue that could comfortably accommodate 400 people. Much of the crowd remained out celebrating until dawn.
This was a city witnessing Jewish life in public and welcoming it, even though the congregation numbered only about 80 souls. And it was also a city reckoning with the aftermath of hate: The ceremony marked the opening of a rebuilt synagogue, after an earlier Beth Israel building had been destroyed by “an incendiary” the year before.
This history matters now. Jackson has long known a double inheritance: the reality of antisemitism, and the presence of neighbors who showed up to support the Jewish community.
After an antisemitic arson attack on Saturday severely damaged Beth Israel — which was rebuilt after being bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1967 — national coverage moved quickly to frame the event as confirmation of a familiar story about Mississippi. One outlet led with the phrase “Mississippi Goddam,” invoking the title of Nina Simone’s civil rights protest anthem as a shorthand for moral condemnation.
Outrage in the face of antisemitic violence is justified. But framing Jackson primarily as a home to deeply rooted hatreds obscures the local reality: a synagogue that has long benefited from relationships with churches and civic partners, and a city where Jewish life has persisted through cooperation, not isolation. When that context disappears, so do the stories of neighbors who still live there, and who will be working to rebuild long after the headlines fade.
Months before the fire, I wrote for a local Jackson publication about Beth Israel’s history as a civic and interfaith institution in the city. My reporting traced how the synagogue’s 19th-century dedication unfolded as a public event, with Christian leaders in attendance and the building treated as a point of local pride.
And it showed me how significant a source of pride Beth Israel has been to its hometown — one of the truths lost, after the arson, in a rush to define Mississippi as a one-dimensional home of bigotry.
The 1875 reports on the synagogue’s opening lingered on details that newspapers of the time reserved for buildings that were points of civic pride, dwelling on the height of the sanctuary, the carved woodwork of the altar, the light from arched windows, and the number of people the pews could seat. One paper ventured that no small congregation “in the entire South, if indeed the whole country,” possessed as fine a place of worship as Beth Israel in Jackson.
That pride is still evident today, particularly in the swell of interfaith support that followed Sunday’s fire.
As the president of Beth Israel Congregation told the Forward, multiple churches reached out in the days following the arson, offering their sanctuaries as temporary worship space for the congregation while repairs are underway.
Rebuilding, he noted, could take up to a year. In the meantime, Jewish life in Jackson would continue.
That gesture may have been quiet, but it is not small. It means Christian congregations opening their doors not just for a one-night vigil or brief program, but for the long, ordinary work of sustaining religious life: making space for Shabbat services, holidays, study and gathering.
This history is not new. After the 1874 arson, local papers reported that a subscription had been started to rebuild the synagogue and predicted that the call would be “generously responded to.” A year later, the congregation, described as “Spartan-like,” rebuilt, assisted by friends in the wider Jackson community.
When Beth Israel dedicated a new synagogue in 1942, amid World War II, the ceremony again unfolded as a civic occasion. The governor of Mississippi sent greetings, the mayor spoke on behalf of the city, and representatives of Catholic and Protestant churches were present.
In his dedication sermon, Rabbi Julian Feibelman urged that the synagogue be consecrated “to everything that is true and that is blessed in the teachings of our faith,” and called it a house meant for “intercommunication and society — the ethical in life.”
When we treat a place as defined by inevitable hatred, we suggest that the people who actually live there are incapable of building a stronger and more welcoming communal life — people like Feibelman, who, in that 1942 sermon, said the synagogue aimed to be “a perpetual lamp” within the community. We treat antisemitism as something to fear from a distance, rather than something neighbors can confront together.
That kind of framing leaves out the work that follows violence. Jewish life in Jackson is not something to be guarded from afar. It is sustained locally, as an integral part of the city it has helped shape.
The post What Jackson, Mississippi’s only synagogue means to its city — in the wake of arson, and beyond appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel Strikes Hezbollah Targets in Several Areas in Lebanon
Illustrative: Smoke rises after Israeli strikes following Israeli military’s evacuation orders, in Tayr Debba, southern Lebanon, Nov. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ali Hankir
The Israeli military said it was striking Hezbollah targets in several areas in Lebanon on Thursday, adding that the strikes were in response to Hezbollah‘s “repeated violations of the ceasefire.”
An Israeli military spokesperson had earlier issued a warning to residents of certain buildings in the Lebanese village of Sohmor.
Israel and Lebanon agreed to a US-brokered ceasefire in 2024, ending more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah that had culminated in Israeli strikes that severely weakened the Iran-backed terrorist group. Since then, the sides have traded accusations over violations.
Lebanon has faced growing pressure from the US and Israel to disarm Hezbollah, and its leaders fear that Israel could dramatically escalate strikes across the battered country to push Lebanon‘s leaders to confiscate Hezbollah‘s arsenal more quickly.
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Pakistan-Saudi-Turkey Defense Deal in Pipeline, Pakistani Minister Says
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif meet in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 17, 2025. Photo: Saudi Press Agency/Handout via REUTERS
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have prepared a draft defense agreement after nearly a year of talks, Pakistan‘s Minister for Defense Production said, a signal they could be seeking a bulwark against a flare-up of regional violence in the last two years.
Raza Hayat Harraj told Reuters on Wednesday the potential deal between the three regional powers was separate from a bilateral Saudi–Pakistani accord announced last year. A final consensus between the three states is needed to complete the deal, he said.
“The Pakistan–Saudi Arabia-Turkey trilateral agreement is something that is already in pipeline,” Harraj said in an interview.
“The draft agreement is already available with us. The draft agreement is already with Saudi Arabia. The draft agreement is already available with Turkey. And all three countries are deliberating. And this agreement has been there for the last 10 months.”
Asked at a press conference in Istanbul on Thursday about media reports on negotiations between the three sides, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said talks had been held but that no agreement had been signed.
Fidan pointed to a need for broader regional cooperation and trust to overcome distrust that creates “cracks and problems” that led to the emergence of external hegemonies, or wars and instability stemming from terrorism, in the region.
“At the end of all of these, we have a proposal like this: all regional nations must come together to create a cooperation platform on the issue of security,” Fidan said. Regional issues could be resolved if relevant countries would “be sure of each other,” he added.
“At the moment, there are meetings, talks, but we have not signed any agreement. Our President [Tayyip Erdogan]’s vision is for an inclusive platform that creates wider, bigger cooperation and stability,” Fidan said, without naming Pakistan or Saudi Arabia directly.