Maksymilian Apolinary Hartglas (7 April 1883 – 7 March 1953) was a Zionist activist and one of the main political leaders of Polish Jews during the interwar period, a lawyer, a publicist, and a Sejm deputy from 1919 to 1930.

[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.

[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.

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.

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.