He grows old. He says so. He is 87. "I won't live much longer. Another few years. That'll be it." The tone is matter-of-fact. He has such troubles as few old men dwell on. He worries whether he will be allowed rest in peace.
"Who will look after our graves?" he asks.
He wants to be buried in Cork with his "parents, my wife, brothers". But he doesn't want them, or him, to be left there under wild grass and broken gravestones. When, maybe, "God knows who would come in and dig us up and play around with us," he says.
Alas, poor Gerald. In Cork they know him well. Along with his good friend, Fred Rosen, he is doing something now to safeguard his bones hereafter. They are setting up a fund to maintain the graveyard after they die. So that when there are no more Jews in Cork, their remains will not be violated in death. He deserves such peace in Irish soil. He has done the State some service.
Gerald Goldberg was Mayor of Cork in 1977 to 1978 and served the city as public representative and solicitor for many years. "I made it," he says with disarming pleasure, "I made it because of the people of Ireland, not the government of Ireland."
It is a sentiment which many of his co-religionists echo. The three principal cities on this island have had Jewish mayors, an indication of the great part played in the life of Ireland this century by Jews. Sir Otto Jaffa was Lord Mayor of Belfast in 1912, recalls Ronnie Appleton, president of Belfast's Hebrew Congregation. He also remembers that the "Mr Wolff" of Harland and Wolff was Jewish. Robert (Bob) Briscoe was Lord Mayor of Dublin from 1956 to 1957 and again from 1961 to 1962. He fought in the War of Independence, and alongside de Valera in the Civil War, before becoming a Fianna Fail TD in 1927. He served in the Dail until 1965, when he was succeeded by his son Ben, who still holds the seat. That makes for 72 years unbroken public service by the family.
Others to serve in public life here include the former Labour Minister for Equality and Law Reform, Mervyn Taylor, and the Fine Gael spokesman on Health and Children, Alan Shatter. Many members of the community have distinguished themselves in law, medicine, business, and the arts. Their contribution to this country has been akin to that which we like to claim for Ireland internationally - totally out of proportion to size. And now they are vanishing.
The number of Jews left in Cork is currently so low they can no longer muster the required 10-plus males over 13 to hold a service in the synagogue on South Terrace. The community in its entirety is "about 10", with "five or six" males. Quite a drop from the 400-plus in Cork during the late 1930s. Goldberg and his friend Fred Rosen are determined, however, that, as long as there is one Jew left in Cork, there will be a synagogue. But what then, when all the living are the dead?
A sorry state. Gerald Goldberg blames "a series of governments" in general and the Department of Justice in particular. "I haven't a good word to say for them," he remarks of the latter, referring to its strict policy of keeping Jews out of Ireland, particularly prior to and during the second World War and in the immediate postwar period.
At that time young Jews also found it hard to get employment in Ireland, so it was hardly surprising when 800-plus of them left in 1948 for the new state of Israel. Their young still go. About 70 per cent of the total population of Irish Jews is said to be more than 60. Young Jews wishing to meet young Jews must go. And they do. All the young Jews.
Joe Briscoe (son of Bob Briscoe) hasn't a good word to say for the Department of Justice either. He is just glad his father is dead. In Dublin, where he lives, there are about 1,000 Jews left. Down from 3,000-plus in 1961.
"I never thought at any time I would be happy my father was dead," Joe Briscoe comments. But when he read Prof Dermot Keogh's book, Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland last year, he realised "it would have killed him if he were alive".
The perfidy of the Department of Justice and, to a lesser degree, both the Departments of External Affairs (now Foreign Affairs) and Industry and Commerce, as evidenced in the book, overwhelmed him. In particular, he found the duplicity of one of the Department of Justice officials, Peter Berry, very difficult to accommodate.
Berry lived near the Briscoes on Clyde Road in Dublin. He was a close friend of Bob Briscoe. Joe remembers them having coffee together in the Dail, when it was "Peter this and Bob that".
It was too much then to discover that Berry had argued so trenchantly (in 1951) against the admission of any more Jews to Ireland; that he questioned, before government, Bob Briscoe's word; that he had put forward a memo to government stating ". . .that the question of admission of aliens of Jewish blood presents a special problem and the alien laws have been administered less liberally (in Ireland) in their case."
What a falling off was there! No friend in deed.
Joe Briscoe is now also convinced that the 1935 Aliens Act was introduced here specifically to stop persecuted Jews, escaping Germany, from getting into Ireland. It succeeded. Dr Keogh concludes that during the Third Reich period the number of Jews allowed into Ireland "may have been as few as 60". Among those refused entry was Bob Briscoe's aunt. She died in Auschwitz.
"Why did your father let my mother die?" asked an elderly lady of Joe Briscoe in Tel Aviv in the mid-1980s. He was on a visit to Israel when someone had asked whether he would like to see his cousin in Tel Aviv. A cousin in Tel Aviv? He hadn't known he had a cousin in Tel Aviv. It was this old lady, Joe's father's first cousin.
Recognising his perplexity at her question, she followed with another one. "Surely you know?" she asked. But he didn't. He didn't know that she and her siblings had been allowed into Palestine by the British in 1937/8 or thereabouts, and that their mother had to stay behind in Berlin, as visas were issued only to children. Or that she had then written to his father, her nephew Bob, "a member of the government (party) in Dublin", as the old lady put it. Or that his father had then gone to the Minister for Justice, Gerry Boland, and been refused a visa for his aunt.
Joe Briscoe does not know why his father didn't go to de Valera about the matter. The then Taoiseach frequently overturned Department of Justice decisions on Jews. His father deified de Valera, and Dev liked him. He was at Bob's bedside shortly before he died. Joe just does not understand it. He knows his father intervened in many, many other such cases. He found letters after he died. So many, many "pitiful letters" from desperate Jews trying to escape the Nazis. Useless letters.
And he utterly rejects civil service arguments that the admission of Jews here would have increased unemployment. Jews create jobs, he commented. It was their way wherever they went, their entrepreneurial spirit. Nor would he give credence to Department of Justice memos stating there was "strong anti-Jewish feeling in this State (which is particularly evident to the Aliens Section of the Department of Justice)".