The best advice for Elaine's situation becomes simpler. To maximize the likelihood that readers will see the right glyphs, add a "font-family" style line that lists a variety of available fonts, in decreasing order of coverage and attractiveness.
My "bad advice" comes effectively from the confusion about two SIL related fonts: one with legacy encoding (handled in browsers as if it was ISO-8859-1 encoded, so that you need to insert text in the HTML page using only the code points in the Latin-1 page starting at U+0000, even though they do not represent the correct Unicode characters), and the other coded with Unicode (for which you need to encode your text with Habrew code points...).
But your advice, Doug, still won't work when multiple fonts in the font-family style use distinct encodings: Mixing SIL Ezra with Arial, or similar Unicode encoded fonts will never produce the intended fallbacks if users don't have SIL Ezra effectively installed and selectable in their browser environment.
Legacy encoded fonts only contain a codepage/charset identifier (most often ISO-8859-1) and no character to glyph translation table; also don't work properly with browsers configured for accessibility, where only the user-defined prefered fonts are allowed, and fonts specified in HTML pages must be ignored by the browser, user styles having been set to higher priority (even if one uses the "important (!)" CSS style rule markers), unless the default font mapping associated with the codepage/charset identifier effectively corresponds to what would be found in a regular char-to-glyph mapping table present in that font.
