Apolinary Hartglas

Maksymilian Apolinary Hartglas was born into a lawyer family from Podlasie. Between 1892 and 1900 he attended a secondary school in Biała Podlaska. Subsequently he earned a law degree from Warsaw University in 1904.[1] Between 1907 and 1919 he practiced law in Siedlce with an additional office in Warsaw.[2] While at the university he became involved with the Zionist movement and in 1906 he participated in a Zionist Helsingfors conference in Helsinki.[1]

After the Nazi invasion of Poland and German occupation he was made a member of the Warsaw Judenrat.[3]

In December 1939, he managed to escape to Trieste, Italy and immigrated to Palestine. He settled in Jerusalem. After the establishment of the State of Israel he served as a high ranking administrator in the Ministry of the Interior.[4]

In 1919 he was elected by constituents of Biała Podlaska as a deputy to the first Sejm of the newly independent Polish state which was charged with writing a new constitution. In all he served three terms as a delegate.[1][2] Before the elections of 1922 together with Yitzhak Gruenbaum he was a co-creator of Bloc of National Minorities, a parliamentary organization whose purpose was to represent ethnic minorities in the Polish parliament.[5] One of his first acts as a deputy of the Sejm was to introduce a law which annulled all Russian sponsored laws which discriminated against Jews in the former Congress Poland.[6]

In 1920 he took part in the Polish-Soviet War as a volunteer. Between 1938 and 1939 he was a member of the Warsaw City Council. During this time he published articles in "Głos Żydowski", "Tygodnik Żydowski" and "Życie Żydowskie" newspapers.[7]

In 1996, his memoirs were published posthumously in Poland under the title At the border of two worlds (Polish: Na pograniczu dwóch światów) (ISBN 978-83-86678-35-8), in which he described the social and political realities of Poland at the turn of the century, during World War I, and the interwar period. In the book he wrote:[8][9]

I called my memoirs “At the border of two worlds” not because I had in mind the world of today and the eternal ever existing world but for a much more mundane reason. I, myself as a human being found myself at a border of the Jewish world and the Polish world. To elaborate, throughout my whole life, two forces, difficult to reconcile, strove within me: a Polish childhood and upbringing, an attachment to the Polish nation, its culture and its soil together with a self formed love for the Jewish nation, its suffering and troubles and the hope of its rebirth in its own homeland. My whole life I suffered a split within myself since there is no power that could have fused these two different souls. I loved both nations as a man and I was at times critical and angry at both of them: as a Jew I could not forget the wrongs that my people sometimes suffered in Poland (personally I have not suffered these) and as one assimilated into the Polish culture I shared some of the grief that even the best of Poles occasionally had towards the Jews. ^{(Translated from Polish)}

• Ozjasz Thon