Fonts & Character Sets ⇒ problems with hebrew characters inside latin text

[noordung]

I've decided to post after reading similar posts and after unsuccessfully trying some possible solutions.
The first attachment is a file I've "inherited" by previous editor of a publication in which i need to insert some hebrew characters.
I've tried with the line

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\usepackage[hebrew,italian]{babel}

with some variants of font encodings ([T1],[HE8,OT1],etc...)
and input encodings utf8,latin1,etc...
before and after the "babel" line.
In many cases with the following output error:

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! LaTeX Error: Command \hebtet unavailable in encoding T1.

with latin1 encoding it seems to work, but it outputs a strange error for
\lettrine[lines=3,findent=.1cm,nindent=.1cm]
(I'm not able to replicate this error situation )
But I'm so frustrated 'cause another (provaheb, the 2nd from bottom in attachment) .tex file works fine and - surprisingly - I'm able to compile it without errors.
Why does the 2nd file work and the 1st doesn't?
Thanks in advance