How does a former Hollywood actress end up in Jerusalem’s Old City, with a lively frum family of eight kids, running hilarious and highly popular laughter games workshops?

Hollywood may have been a detour from Debbie Hirsch’s true calling in Jerusalem. But detours, she has since come to learn, aren’t necessarily mistakes.

Her foray there was on the whim of her sister Lisa. It made perfect sense at the time, given her family’s background in the performing arts and her high school education at the School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. Her parents, Shimon and Ilana Gewirtz, also known as the Balladeers, were famous performers and played Jewish folk music the world over.

Debbie, fresh out of college with a degree in radio and television broadcasting (“I originally thought I wanted to be a newscaster”), and with no particular direction in mind, was more than eager to do something fun.

“In our circles back then,” says Debbie, “you went to college to get an easy degree and have fun. It was like, what now? We didn’t have that sense of purpose or direction that frum girls have.

“ ‘Come join me out here in L.A.,’ my sister said to me. ‘Try out for auditions in Hollywood and see what you get.’ And I thought, Why not? “But all I had was the total of $12 in my pocket, which meant no money for a plane ticket. ‘Go get a job,’ said Lisa, ‘and come when you’re ready.’ And I said, ‘‘Okay.’ ”

The first unexpected curve in Debbie’s trajectory came in the form of her friend Tracy, who at the time was trying to raise funds for the Children’s Wish Foundation. Was Debbie interested in joining her on a transcontinental bike trip toward this purpose? Her direction: New York to California. Debbie, still unfamiliar with terms like Hashgachah pratis, couldn’t believe her good fortune. It was exactly where she was headed. And it wouldn’t cost her a penny.

“My parents always encouraged me to try out new things, to take risks, get out of my comfort zone, which this certainly was. It was scary, it was fun, it was crazy, and it was adventurous,” says Debbie. Three-and-a-half months and some 3,600 miles later found her safely in L.A. with her sister Lisa.

Auditions, at first, were all the glitz and all the glamour that Hollywood is made out to be. She even got onto a few movie sets. Which, she says, was “thrilling, and also intimidating — in a good way.”

But her dissatisfaction wasn’t long in coming. “I still remember that moment,” recalls Debbie. “It was the end of a long ten-hour day. We’d just finished shooting for a scene, doing the same thing for the hundredth time in one day, and I thought, Is this it? Is this what I want to spend my life doing? The emptiness I felt then… There was nothing underneath, no altruism, no meaning. Who was I helping? I thought. Who was I inspiring? There has to be more to life than this. My parents had brought us up to do chesed, to help others, and I knew then that whatever I’d choose to do, I wanted to touch other people’s lives.”

The attention, the stardom, felt great, says Debbie. “But it was all so fleeting, so fake, so void of goodwill, of spirituality. You don’t understand — the number of rejections! We’d stand online with 200 other people at a time, practicing a combination for hours on end. Then they’d call you back and you were one among a hundred. Then they’d call you back and you were one among 50. They’d call you back again; now there were 20. And all they needed were two.

“They’d watch you do your moves again and again, you’d turn this way and that way, and you’d get all excited, and then you were told, Nope, not good enough.

“It was always not good enough. You’re not tall enough, you’re not short enough, you’re not skinny enough. Not enough, never enough. Who feels good that way? Who even needs it?

“In Hollywood, there are a few famous people,” she says, debunking much of the Hollywood myth about everyone emerging famous. “The rest are waiters.”

Debbie didn’t want to spend her life waiting tables at a restaurant while trying to make it in an impossible world. Her stint at Hollywood was over.

But that tekufah produced something else. One gift was her husband, who she got to know and date during her stay in California. Another gift was a precious realization, which first dawned at Hollywood itself, and then spread within her as she learned more and more that doing things for others was what made you feel much more accomplished than any fame and glory.