Dorothy Brickman, the Vineyard educator and international social worker who blazed early trails as a Jewish woman and first-generation American, died Oct. 17 at the age of 90.

The daughter of Russian immigrant parents, Miss Brickman was credited with being the first Jewish woman born on the Island. She grew up among an emerging Jewish community that remains a stronghold in Vineyard Haven today and began with six families - the original Brickmans, Cronigs and Issoksons of the Vineyard.

"Do you know what inspired me? Everything comes back for me to the Vineyard. My ethics, my values, my principles. I carried them with me wherever I went. I'm still an Islander," she told Island historian Linsey Lee in her second volume of oral history published last year, More Vineyard Voices.

Miss Brickman also was the subject of a short film screened last summer titled An Islander Through and Through of the American Jewish Faith.

She stood four feet ten, never married and pursued a wide-ranging career in social work and higher education that spanned nearly five decades. But her life began in Vineyard Haven, where until the early 1900s there had been no Jewish residents.

"People didn't really have a concept of what people of the Jewish faith were," she told Ms. Lee. "Our parents and the others had to prove themselves in order to exist. They came to this country without any English, with half a penny in their pocket; they worked very, very hard - it was important to earn a living. They were not moneyed or highly educated or professional. It was their performance on the Island as immigrants, their hard work, their sense of responsibility and respect, that was the basis of today's acceptance of Jewry on the Island."

She was born on June 1, 1916, in Vineyard Haven, the daughter of Judal and Eudice Brickman, the last of four children and first to be born on American soil. Her father founded a small cobbler shop in Vineyard Haven which is today the familiar and longstanding Brickman's department store.

In the interview with Ms. Lee, Miss Brickman recalled growing up in a kosher household where Yiddish was spoken, meat was imported from New Bedford and the Sabbath could not be observed because there were not enough men in the families to form a minyan.

All six families would gather on Sundays. "You didn't call anybody to say, ‘I'm coming over' - people just came," she recalled.

Her childhood was a happy affair, with picnics at Tashmoo and sometimes at Gay Head, where Henry Cronig owned property and where her father's friend, Charles Vanderhoop Sr., would take them all up into the Gay Head lighthouse.

In her faith she was alone among her peers, and she recalled one day in grade school when the nurse came and inquired about what kind of breakfast everyone had. "All the other children had great big breakfasts with orange juice and cereal and eggs and bacon or ham. We don't eat bacon or ham and I felt like I couldn't say I just had my mother's homemade bread and butter and cheese and cocoa, so . . . I told a little white lie because I didn't want to be different," she told Ms. Lee.

She was educated in Island schools and attended Simmons College in Boston, where she graduated in 1938 with a degree in social work. After college, she returned home to work in the family store and volunteer for the Red Cross and the Island chapter of the United Service Organization, better known as the USO. This was also the period when the Martha's Vineyard Hebrew Center was established.

"When our little community grew a bit, the elders felt that we should have Friday night services. And we felt a very important responsibility to the summer Jewry who were beginning to come," she told Ms. Lee. "We were all so proud of the center; our life was built around it. Members did it all. We didn't have a rabbi until much later, we did it ourselves."

But with the war looming, Dorothy Brickman longed to do more to help. In an interview with the Vineyard Gazette six years ago, she recalled going to her parents. "I said, ‘The boys in town are going to war. And you have brought me up to be very patriotic. I must go and do something for my country.' "

She worked for the USO for the next 15 years, most of them spent abroad in Panama and the Far East. "I married my job, and I've never known an unhappy day," she told the Gazette.

She also worked for four years as director of volunteer services at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. During that period one day a doctor came to her because a young Jewish refugee girl who had survived the Holocaust had been admitted to the hospital; she spoke a different language, was traumatized and could not communicate. Miss Brickman went to the hospital room and spoke gently to the frightened girl in Yiddish, telling her she was safe. The girl smiled and was able to communicate after that.

In 1956, she pursued new directions, enrolling at Columbia University where she earned two masters' degrees in social work and education. She went to work as the foreign-student advisor at Western College for Women and later became the director of International Student and Scholar Services at Ohio State University.

Her career and her studies took her all over the world. But she continued to come home to the Island almost every summer to help out in the family store and help run programs at the Hebrew Center.

"Dorothy's life was about service: to her family, to her Jewish heritage and community, to the Island, to her country," said Rabbi Caryn Broitman in a hesped at her funeral service last month.

In 1992, her oldest sister Ida, former longtime owner a of dry goods store on Main street in Vineyard Haven, became ill and Dorothy came home to live with and care for her.

"I would say that my greatest accomplishment and my greatest pleasure was that I took care of my sister," she told the Gazette.

Contributions in Miss Brickman's memory may be made to a charity of one's choice, or to the Martha's Vineyard Hebrew Center, P.O. Box 692, Vineyard Haven MA 02568.