Without telling us weights, surface area, thickness of the glass, available power, or much of anything, there's no way to guess at most of what you are asking.
It's pretty safe to say you are not going to be magnetizing and de-magnetizing high coercivity magnetic materials with enough remanence to hold more than a few paper clips using something like a cell-phone battery.
However, because the magnets aren't actually touching due to the thickness of the glass, you might employ a trick used in some latching solenoids where a permanent magnet can be momentarily driven away from a ferromagnetic material by applying a reverse polarity to the latter through windings. So the magnet attracts the steel through the glass, then you switch on a coil wrapped around the steel to repel the magnet. The coil can't stay on for long, but it may work if you just need it to let go while you lift up on the glass.