In the 1850s, Rosa Mordecai attended the famed Sunday school that her great-aunt Rebecca Gratz had created, which was the first to offer American Jewish children an education on Jewish history and religion in English. As an adult, Mordecai and two of her sisters created a private school for girls in Philadelphia, which they ran for forty years.

Proud of her Jewish heritage but conflicted about her faith, Rachel Mordecai Lazarus was torn between publicly fighting antisemitism and privately questioning Judaism’s ideals. Although she studied Judaism to better educate her stepchildren, a series of traumatic events pushed her towards Christianity, and she became an Episcopalian on her deathbed.