Joseph Schwartz, the European Director of the Joint, wrote a cable from Lisbon to his home office in New York. This is the beginning of the airing of a long list of grievances between the Joint and the World Jewish Congress, specifically in Lisbon. At the most basic level, the Joint and the WJC were fighting over credit for the number of individuals rescued out of France to Spain. Not only credit for these people, but for the future of these people. At least nominally, the WJC wanted refugees to ultimately go to Palestine, while the Joint wanted them to go to the US. (This is highly simplified–the Joint claimed they just wanted people to go to the best places, etc). Ultimately (and you’ll probably see documents about this later) one group accused the other of actively sabotaging and preventing rescue.
Anyway, this is one of the first documents about this. The WRB eventually has to send someone to Lisbon to fix the situation. (But didn’t they have a representative in Lisbon already, you ask? Yeah, Robert Dexter of the Unitarians. The fact that the WRB sent someone from Washington shows you what they thought of Dexter’s work.)
