Undefined control sequence Error with moderncv+Hebrew

Question

I would like to use modernv to create a right-to-left CV document in Hebrew. I have downloaded and installed culmus-latex, and Hebrew+English LaTex documents compile without a problem.

I took template.tex, the moderncv boilerplate file, and added the Hebrew packages:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin9,cp1255]{inputenc}

\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{culmus}

And changed the documentclass from:

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper,sans]{moderncv}

To:

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper,sans,english,hebrew]{moderncv}

I got the following error:

...
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/generic/babel/babel.def))
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/generic/babel/rlbabel.def
! Undefined control sequence.
<argument> \thesection 

l.174 }

? 
! Emergency stop.
<argument> \thesection 

l.174 }

!  ==> Fatal error occurred, no output PDF file produced!
Transcript written on template.log.

More info:

• I'm working on Linux Mint with standard texlive packages.
• The original moderncv file and the Hebrew file compile well (separately).
• All documents are encoded in Windows-1255.
• I've uploaded the full tex files, log files and error message to gist:github.

Addendum:

When the inputenc end babel lines are commented out:

%\usepackage[latin9,cp1255]{inputenc}
%\usepackage{babel}

The document compiles, with erroneous Hebrew encoding:

To conclude,

Uh, so, uh, anything you can do to, uh, to help, would be... very... helpful...

Answer 1

moderncv works best with unicode encoding for "exotic" characters, due to some internal hyperref setup.

Therefore, you should encode your file in utf8 and use

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

if you are compiling with pdfLaTeX (or nothing if you are compiling with Xe- or LuaLaTeX) and remove the \inputencoding{latin9} and \inputencoding{cp1255} from your code.