Lee Sher remembers the date: January 19, 2004. It was a blustery, bitingly cold winter day — the day Ms. Sher, an actress, and her longtime boyfriend, Saar Harari, a dancer, first set foot in New York City.

“We had come from Tel Aviv, where it’s always warm, so we were walking down the street with no coats,” Ms. Sher recalled recently, during a break from rehearsal at the 92nd Street Y, where she and Mr. Harari were readying a piece for their company, LeeSaar The Company, for the Harkness Dance Festival. “The wind was so strong that day, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”

Ms. Sher and Mr. Harari — both 30 years old at the time — came to New York sight unseen. They nursed dreams of starting a dance company, and a belief that somehow their adopted city would force them into full bloom as artists. They arrived with $1,000 in cash, a few suitcases, a smattering of English, and two phone numbers they could call. Fortunately for them, one of those numbers belonged to an Israeli friend who worked in real estate; within three days, they had an apartment.

The couple spread the blanket they had brought from home on a mattress left behind by the former tenants and wrote home asking for sheets. In the meantime, they used the empty space for dancing.

“That’s where we started to work on our first piece for the new company,” Mr. Harari said with a smile. “It was easy without furniture.”

Money trickled in from odd jobs. Mr. Harari, an accomplished dancer, found occasional work dancing with pick-up companies; Ms. Sher, a successful actress and playwright in Israel, worked in a shoe store.

Money was scarce enough that they continued to rehearse at their small apartment. In warm weather, they danced in Central Park. There were many times, Ms. Sher noted, when they didn’t know how they would pay the next month’s rent. “But every time we said, ‘Okay, what are we going to do?’ a miracle happened.”

A string of such miracles — and the duo’s prodigious talent — has brought LeeSaar The Company to relative prosperity from total obscurity in three years. In December, Mr. Harari, now 33, received a Six Points Fellowship from the United Jewish Appeal of New York, which provides up to $45,000 in living expenses and project support over two years. And Mr. Harari’s latest choreographic effort, “Part II” — co-directed by Ms. Sher — was chosen to open the 92nd Street Y’s Harkness Dance Festival, which gets under way this week at the Ailey Citigroup Theater.

“Part II” combines new material with reworked fragments from the company’s two previous eveninglength pieces, “Herd of Bulls” (2005), and “Moopim” (2006), which made its premiere at P.S. 122. “Herd of Bulls” came out of Mr. Harari’s experiences in the Israeli military, where he served for five years as an officer. “Moopim,” in contrast, was steeped in bold female sexuality, at the urging of Ms. Sher, who firmly believes that “‘Sex and the City’ changed the world.” The new “Part II” places militaristic and personal movement side by side, in an effort to approximate the powerful contrasts typical of everyday life in Israel.

“You go to the beach and see sexy girls, and then you’re on the sidewalk and you see guys with guns,” Mr. Harari said.

“You drink a cappuccino while you read about another bomb in the paper,” Ms. Sher said. “In Israel, you laugh and cry together in the same moment.”

“And always, you hear the Arabic music,” Mr. Harari added.

An oud player is one of the five performers in “Part II.” Its intermittent music adds to the hot, sweaty atmosphere as Mr. Harari, Ms. Sher, and two female dancers move between skirmishes with an unseen enemy and frankly autoerotic sequences. The trim, dark-eyed Mr. Harari lunges into the air and crashes to the ground with a dire, life-and-death intensity, sometimes in unison with another dancer. In the dance’s other mode, the slender, pretty Ms. Sher periodically appears — eyes closed, swaying, making strange plosive noises with her mouth or tracing a finger sensually over her lips.

Urgency pervades “Part II,” as it does all of the duo’s recent pieces. Mr. Harari ascribes this intensity in large part to his military background. “My physical experience in the forces is a big part of how I dance, how I choreograph, and how we run the company,” he said. “We demand the maximum from the body.”

Ms. Sher also served in the army, working as a kind of specialized social worker, bringing letters to a unit of 80 soldiers at the front and counseling them about personal issues. She befriended dozens of soldiers — including three who were killed in Lebanon. “It’s very Israeli, to serve in the military and then come out and live a civilian life,” she said. “And on the street you feel life and death, violence but also sex, danger next to fun.” The fact that Mr. Harari and Ms. Sher traveled more than 5,000 miles to a foreign, inhospitable city to create pieces steeped in their native culture strikes them as perfectly logical. “When you live in a place that you’re so connected to, it’s harder to find who you are as yourself,” Mr. Harari said. “Living in New York helps us to get away from our habits, our ties.”

“You have no mommy and daddy to cry to,” Ms. Sher said brusquely. “You can fall and nobody can be there. But sometimes you find more layers in yourself when you are alone.”

Begins February 14 (Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 W. 55th St. at Ninth Avenue, 212-415-5500).