The essay elaborates on the commemorative history of the "unknown soldier" in pre-state and post-independence Israel. The first part of the essay elaborates on the featuring of the “unknown soldier” in the Zionist discourse of the Jewish Yishuv. The second part of the essay focuses on successive stages in the history of the state-sponsored project that, beginning in 1949, sought to integrate remembrance of the Unknown Soldier into the liturgical foundations of Israel’s statehood.