France, documentary, 2 parts (50 and 52 min), Zadig Productions, Arte, 2026.
Responding to a contest of autobiographical accounts launched by YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research) in the 1930s, more than 600 young Jews of Yiddishland, aged 16 to 22, bear witness to the vitality, the thirst for emancipation, and the ideological and political upheavals of their generation – the last before the catastrophe. Thanks to the miraculous rediscovery of around twenty of these autobiographies and to rare images, amateur films and the first films of Yiddish cinema, Jonathan Hayoun gives voice once again to the youth of a tragically vanished world.
In conversation with Léa Veinstein, author and philosopher.
With the support of the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah.
Programme as part of the 70th anniversary of the creation of the Mémorial du Martyr juif inconnu, which became the Mémorial de la Shoah in 2005.