state of BIDI within stable GNU emacs (UTF8) nikud

Hello


After a long time I have to use GNU emacs to write some hebrew text
(most likely including nikud). 

    - I   am currently trying out  the  stable emacs 21.4 version
      (shipped with Debian  unstable). That  version has no   R2L
      support as far as I can see. Which version has, a snapshot
      version. 

    - Could the hebrew  text be saved as UTF8  (I would need that
      urgently)

    - I remember having seen   some emacs branch which  had  even
      nikud support, but   I forgot where, could  somebody please
      give me pointer.

Regards

Uwe Brauer