Rebecca Lepkoff (née Brody) was born August 4, 1916, on Hester Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the daughter of Isadore Brody and Anna Rose Schwartz, Jewish emigrants from Minsk, Russian Empire (now Belarus), who arrived in New York City in 1910.
Living in tenements, the growing family moved several times but always remained within the boundaries of the Lower East Side.
In time, the family of eight was living in a two-bedroom tenement apartment, but Rebecca recalled many early happy memories.
She then attended Seward Park High School but dropped out at age 16, as the brunt of the Great Depression bore down in the Lower East Side.
"[6] She also took gymnastic classes and played basketball at the Educational Alliance, a settlement house and community center on the Lower East Side.
[7] She fell in with the Experimental Dance Group, a company led by Bill Matons, and was soon performing at museums and colleges.
In 1939, she was hired to work as a dancer at the New York World's Fair, where she performed routines in a staging about the history of railroads.
She enrolled in photography classes offered free by the New Deal's National Youth Administration, which, advantageously, had an office on the Lower East Side.
"[8] In 1940, the U.S. Census captured Rebecca, at age 24, living with her family at 221 East Broadway, only a block from the Seward Park Library.
[11] Rebecca Lepkoff was an active member of the Photo League from 1947 until 1951 when it was dissolved as a "communist organization" in the McCarthy era.