Local television channels and streaming services are commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day 2026 on the evening of April 12 and on April 13 with special programming that tells both well-known and obscure true stories that illuminate the tragedy and help keep alive the memory of those who lost their lives.
A highlight of this programming will be a new HOT edition of Zikaron BaSalon (Hebrew for “Remembrance in the Living Room”), an intimate project in which Holocaust survivors recount their stories in private homes.
Select meetings of Zikaron BaSalon are filmed and made accessible to viewers at home, a collaboration that is now in its fifth year.
Zikaron BaSalon is an international initiative, and to learn more about it and either host or take part in a gathering, go to their website at https://www.zikaronbasalon.com/en/home-2/
HOT will show the classic film, Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann, one of the most influential documentaries ever made, in which eyewitnesses describe every aspect of the Nazi killing machine, from the first mobile gas chambers to the industrialized extermination carried out in the death camps.
Lanzmann famously chose to avoid both archival footage and reenactments.
Instead, he returned to the killing sites themselves and filmed interviews with people who were directly involved in the events, including Jewish survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators.
He spent more than a decade on the project, which received little support and fanfare while Lanzmann labored on it, filming more than 350 hours of interviews, which he eventually winnowed down to a film that runs nine hours and 26 minutes.
The interviewees and the information they impart amount to a groundbreaking film, one that has had more impact on how the Holocaust is remembered than any other.
Shoah will be broadcast as a 10-part series beginning on April 13, with the first two episodes airing at 4 p.m. on HOT 8, HOT VOD, and Next TV.
While I don’t think a television screening can match the experience of seeing the film over the course of a single day in a theater, there are benefits to breaking it up into smaller chunks.
When viewing it on the big screen, at a certain point, almost every audience member will become overwhelmed and lose focus.
Arguably, the most memorable scenes are the interviews with two specific survivors. The first is Simon Srebnik, one of two survivors of the Chelmno extermination camp, where 400,000 Jews were murdered and where gas vans were first used. Srebnik was forced to sing popular songs to entertain the Germans.
The second is Abraham Bomba, a barber who had to cut women’s hair in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp and who was filmed cutting a man’s hair in a Tel Aviv barber shop.
In the recent documentary, All I Had Was Nothingness, by Guillaume Ribot, which tells the story of how Lanzmann made Shoah, the director said that the film’s subject was “death itself and not survival.”
While so many movies, especially recent ones, about the Holocaust have focused on survival stories, Shoah catalogs the enormity of the entire crime.
A new documentary on HOT 8, HOT VOD, and Next TV, The Politics of Memory, examines how Holocaust remembrance has changed in Israel since the founding of the state and also looks at Holocaust remembrance in the aftermath of October 7 and the war against Hamas.
Other Holocaust-related content on HOT’s VOD service includes The Jewish Council, a Dutch mini-series about the conflict involving Jews in the ghetto who served as members of the Judenrat.
We Were the Lucky Ones (which can also be streamed on Disney+), the successful American series based on the true story of the Kurc family’s struggle to survive across several countries, starring Joey King, Logan Lerman, Hadas Yaron, Amit Rahav, Moran Rosenblatt, Michael Aloni, and Lior Ashkenazi, is another.
Lastly, there is A Small Light, based on the true story of Miep Gies, Otto Frank’s Dutch secretary, who helped hide him and his family, including Anne Frank, during World War II.
HOT Cinema will also make a number of Holocaust-related films available for viewing, including Life Is Beautiful and Schindler’s List (which can also be streamed on Apple TV+).
YES unveils biographical documentary series
YES’s programming includes a major new documentary series, The Hypnotist from Buchenwald, by Shay Fogelman, which won the Investigative Award at the Docaviv Festival 2025.
It will be shown on Yes Docu and Yes VOD starting on April 12. The three-part series is a biographical and psychological portrait of Dr. Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen.
He was a brilliant doctor and one of the pioneers of psychiatric research who was also a mysterious spy, an elusive con man, and a notorious hypnotist. He became the only Jew in history to be convicted of Nazi war crimes.
Also showing on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day will be Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire by Oren Rudavsky, about the Holocaust survivor, writer, and Nobel Prize laureate, which will air on April 13 on Yes Docu and Yes VOD. The documentary screened at Telluride in 2024 and at Docaviv in 2025.
The film includes an interview with Elisha, Wiesel’s son, who says of his father: “I saw him like a radio transmitter receiving voice frequencies no one else could hear, because he heard the ghosts.
“He brought them back to life. Even when he did not speak about them, the weight of their burden was evident.”
The movie is an intimate portrait of Wiesel that uses both archival material and interviews to paint an in-depth portrait of the influential author who made it his life’s mission to see to it that the Holocaust was never forgotten.
Cellcom has several movies for Holocaust Remembrance Day, including both dramas and documentaries. Helen Mirren stars in Woman in Gold, the true story of a Jewish refugee who sued the Austrian government to recover artworks the Nazis stole from her family.
Resistance stars Jesse Eisenberg as Marcel Marceau, the famous mime, and focuses on how he worked with the French Resistance during the war.
One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins, tells the story of a British stockbroker who saved hundreds of Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.
Netflix brings Holocaust historical dramas
Netflix features several historical dramas, including Operation Finale, the story of the capture of the mastermind of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, by Israeli spies, which stars Ben Kingsley and Oscar Isaac.
The acclaimed documentary The Commandant’s Shadow is available to stream on HBO Max. It tells the true story that was fictionalized in The Zone of Interest, about the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Höss, who brought his family to live in a compound on the camp’s grounds.
As is so often the case, the truth is far more interesting and layered than its fictional depiction.
The Commandant’s Shadow, which won the Yad Vashem Award for Outstanding Holocaust Documentary at Docaviv last year, is told through the perspectives of five people.
It showcases Höss’s viewpoint, whose thoughts are taken from an autobiography he wrote in prison after the war and which are read aloud by an actor, as well as from his testimony at the Nuremberg trials.
Then there are the vantage points of his son, Hans-Jurgen Höss, now an elderly man; Hans’s son, Kai Höss, a Christian preacher; Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, an Auschwitz survivor now living in the UK; and Anita’s daughter, Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, who has moved to Germany.
All of them bring something different to the story in this extremely effective and moving documentary that looks at the Holocaust and its legacy.