The third child of Reyna Hays and Isaac Touro, Rebecca Hays Touro was born in Newport, Rhode Island, during the Revolutionary War. Her father, served as the first spiritual leader of the Jews of Newport. Hazzan of Congregation Jeshuat Israel, in 1763 he consecrated the synagogue now known as Touro Synagogue. In 1776, most of the Jewish community fled the British occupation of Newport, but Isaac determined to stay put. However, when the hardships of living there grew to be too much for his young family, Isaac moved them to New York and then to Jamaica, where he passed away in 1783. At the time Rebecca was just four years old, and her brothers, Abraham and Judah, nine and eight respectively. Their mother Reyna then brought her family to Boston to live under the roof of her brother Moses Michael Hays and his family.

Both Abraham and Judah, who were very successful in business, became important early philanthropists. Abraham left a provision in his will for the maintenance of the Jewish cemetery and synagogue in Newport, both of which had fallen into disrepair. However, Abraham’s funds sat idle in a trust for two years until, in 1824, Rebecca petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly that her brother’s “liberal donation was intended to be appropriated for the benefit of the two places in any way conducive to keep them always in a state of complete repair, to be transmitted and conveyed to a succeeding Congregation which he then contemplated might in progress of time settle again at Newport … If my prayer is finally rejected and both places are to be abandoned and forsaken to save a just recompense to an agent indispensably necessary to have a constant eye on them, they inevitably must go to ruin, contrary to my brother’s laudable design.” In the end her petition was successful, and in 1825 the restoration of the synagogue began, becoming one of the earliest efforts at historic preservation in The United States.

In 1828, as she was nearing fifty, Rebecca married Joshua Lopez, himself approaching sixty. Joshua’s father was Aaron Lopez, “the merchant prince of Newport,” who had been a close friend of Isaac Touro and a benefactor of the synagogue in the heyday of the Jewish community of Newport. Although they lived in New York, when Rebecca died five years later her will stipulated that she, like so many other former Newport Jews, be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Newport.