Racie (Friedenwald) Adler was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on August 5, 1872, one of at least three daughters of Moses and Jane (Alborn) Friedenwald. She was of a distinguished and well-off German Jewish family whose members played important roles in the formation and direction of many major American Jewish institutions. Her grandfather Jonas, a successful businessman who had emigrated from Germany, was very active as a Jewish communal leader, as were his sons, who included the prominent ophthalmologist Aaron Friedenwald.

The details of Racie’s life before her marriage at the age of thirty-three are unclear, beyond the fact that she was educated at Goucher College in Baltimore. She married a man of similar socioeconomic background, who was equally devoted to Jewish communal involvement. Indeed, shaped by her family’s position in society and the nature of its public commitments, Adler was ideally suited to be the wife of Cyrus Adler, the Assyriology scholar and major Jewish communal figure she married in September 1905. Characteristically for a woman of her time and social position, she played a strong, supportive role for her husband and his career, often assisting him in his work and proofreading his manuscripts. She accompanied him on many of his travels abroad, to Egypt, Palestine, and throughout Europe. Among their friends and acquaintances, the Adlers counted many high-level members of government administration, including the Roosevelts, diplomats such as Oscar Straus, and illustrious Jewish families such as the Warburgs.

Their only child, Sarah, was born in 1906. Her life seems to have been modeled on her mother’s. When she grew old enough, she, too, helped her father in his scholarly work, and in January 1932, she married Wolfe Wolfinsohn, also from an “aristocratic” German Jewish family.

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