While many expected, at the end of the Cold War, that global capitalism, along with Neoliberal reforms that began taking place in many states since the 1980’s, would bring the decline of nation states and their cults, giving way to global and local identities; an examination of commemorative cults in the two most prominent national days in Israel and Turkey, Ataturk Memorial day (November 10th) and Memorial Day (Yom Hazikaron) in Israel in the 1990’s and 2000’s shows quite the contrary. In both states, not only did public interest in national cults not diminish, commemorative cults took on new forms and created renewed interest and debate around them. In doing that, these new forms and debates broadened circles of participation and established two of the most important founding myths in both nations (the image of Ataturk as the founder of Modern Turkey and the image of Fallen Soldiers in Israel) as inviolable realms where national identity is negotiated and contested even among groups that were initially marginalized or excluded from the national community. The Turkish debate took on a more political tone. In the mid 1990’s secular Turks reclaimed commemorative cults of Ataturk in reaction to what they saw as a takeover of political Islam in the country, which lead to mass participation in November 10th cults for the first time in decades. This mass participation did not just come from secularists but also from government officials, conservative and religious Turks, who infused their own agenda into these cults, stirring yet more anger and contestation between religious and secular in the country. In Israel, the struggle was more social, and revolved around the question of belonging to the “nation’s dead”, when a variety of groups demanded their equal symbolic and material place in “the family of the bereaved” as means to get accepted into the national community. Such groups in include bereaved families of Druze and Bedouin fallen soldiers, of holocaust survivors that fought in the 1948 War, of members of paramilitary revisionist pre-state organizations, of civilian victims of acts to terror, and even of Palestinians, who adopted bereavement discourse into their own narrative using it to interact with Israeli bereaved families as means for reconciliation.