Henrietta Frankfurter was the daughter of Rabbi Feibisch Frankfurter of Friedberg. In 1843 she married Samuel Adler, a student of her father who had recently been elected the district rabbi of the congregations in Alzey in Rhenish Hesse. In 1857, Henrietta, Samuel, and their two sons, Isaak and Felix, set sail for New York, where Samuel had accepted a post as the rabbi of Reform congregation Temple Emanu-El.

Samuel enjoyed a successful career as one of the leaders of American Reform Judaism. Felix would become a prominent professor of ethics, a social reformer, and founder of the Ethical Culture movement. He later remarked on his mother’s “strong sense of practical righteousness” as a powerful influence on his moral development, recalling how she brought him along on trips to deliver food to the city’s poor tenement dwellers and how she opened her doors inviting the less fortunate to dine with the Adler family.