Helen Hadassah Levinthal was born on April 22, 1910, into a distinguished, multi-generational rabbinic family whose prestige and communal responsibilities shaped her interest in studying Judaism at an advanced level and serving the Jewish community. Her father, Rabbi Israel Herbert Levinthal (1888–1982), was a leading Conservative rabbi and long‑time spiritual head of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, an institution remembered as a beacon of Jewish life in New York City and a magnet for large Friday‑evening crowds drawn by his sermons. He also taught homiletics at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary. He was a lifelong Zionist. Born in Vilna, he was a graduate of Columbia University and had a law degree from New York University. Her mother was May R. Bogandoff; May and Israel also had a son, Lazar.

 Lyon’s paternal grandfather, Rabbi Bernard [Dov Ariyeh] Louis Levinthal (1864–1952), was ordained in Lithuania by Rabbi Isaac Elchana Spektor, for whom the rabbinic program at Yeshiva University was named. He was one of the leading Orthodox rabbis in the United States for over 50 years but often worked across a broad spectrum of Jewish organizations. He served Congregation B’nai Abraham, Philadelphia’s largest Eastern European synagogue, from 1891 until his death. He played a major role in the founding of Yeshiva University (1896), the Orthodox Union (1898), the American Agudas Harabbanim (1901), and Mizrachi (1902), now the Religious Zionists of America. 

Despite her family’s visibility in the rabbinic world, after marrying Lester Lyons in 1939, Helen took his surname as her own. The couple had two children, Judith and George David. Lester was also active in Jewish communal life.

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In 1988, a year before her death of a brain tumor in New Rochelle, New York, on August 13, 1989, the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion issued Lyons a special certificate of recognition—a belated acknowledgment that she had completed rabbinic training at a level equivalent to her male peer. In 2022, on the fiftieth anniversary of Sally Priesand’s ordination, Lyons was featured in a Hadassah magazine article for her pioneering role in American Jewish women’s religious history. A camp scholarship was set up by her husband in her memory. Today, Helen Hadassah Levinthal Lyons is remembered as one of the “would be” rabbis who served as a pioneer in the history of American Judaism.