Born Merthyr Tydfil, October 16, 1917. Died London, July 20, 2008, aged 90.
A co-founder of the Jewish Blind and Disabled Society in 1969, Gershon Cohen was a quiet and generous charity supporter.
Known as Gus, he was the second youngest of the seven children of a Polish immigrant from Plonsk to London's East End. One sister, Anne, survives. His hard-working father, Harry (Zvi), took the family on horse-drawn trips to Epping Forest, driving the horses himself. Gus was born on a family holiday in Wales.
Qualifying as a surveyor at night school, Gus set up a property management business in Islington, North London, in the late 1930s with Kenneth Edis. He kept the firm's name, Kenneth Edis & Coren, unchanged after Edis's death in the Second World War and stayed in the same unpretentious high street premises until retiring in 1999.
He himself served in the army and RAF, stationed in Northern Ireland where his good looks convinced some local girls that he was Gene Kelly.
His lifelong service friends introduced him to Muriel Collins, whom he married in 1947 at Golders Green (United) Synagogue. It turned out that her East End cinema operator father, Ben, originated from Plonsk with the surname Cohen and had played klezmer music at the wedding of Gus's aunt.
During a 40-year business career, Gus displayed his strong work ethic, keen intelligence, retentive memory, shrewd judgment and sense of humour, honesty and fair play. Establishing a charitable foundation early on, he gave generously to the Jewish Welfare Board and its successor, Jewish Care, to Nightingale House old age home and the medical charities Magen David Adom and Hadassah.
He maintained a keen financial and personal involvement in the Jewish Blind and Disabled Society, of which he was vice-president. He was a co-founder of the 1960 JNF-led Committee for Israel. He also supported non-Jewish charities, including several hospices.
Modest about his achievements and generosity, and imbued with a strong moral sense, he deplored the property price bubble as an insidious and destructive phenomenon. He was equally dismayed by what he saw as the lunacies, dishonesties and hypocrisies of recent events, domestic and global.
A private man, he was close to his mother, Esther, who died in 1954, and never got over the death in 1976 of his son, Andrew, at the age of 25.
His business partner, his brother, Aaron (Alan), died in 1998. Another brother, Sam, who worked in the business, died in 1989. Sam's son, the humorist Alan Coren, died in 2007.
He is survived by his wife, Muriel, and son, Anthony.