Well, everyone on the bboard has been super-helpful. In the end, your help wasn't needed:
I received a call from the graphic designer today. She said that everyone was asking (impatiently) when the site will be ready. I told her that the site is ready, but that I'm still working on getting OpenACS to handle windows-1255 encoding. I told her (once again) that if she's willing to work in Unicode, then I can simply run "recode" over the entire system, and it'll be ready within seconds.
She said that if it's not too hard to work in Unicode (which is a question of operating system, applications, and all sorts of other fun, for those who haven't ever had to deal with end users on this issue), then she's willing to try it. I gave her a link to the Windows version of GNU recode, transformed the site, and everything worked fine.
So thanks again to everyone here, but it seems that life is just easier in general when everyone works with Unicode -- and the time I spent investigating and playing with this dwarfs the time that she'll have to invest in learning "recode".
