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NEW YORK — Elizabetta Kostoveskaya is paralyzed from a stroke and suffering from Alzheimer's, homebound in a subsidized apartment run by the Council for Jewish Elderly in Chicago.

Since her emigration from Kiev in 1992, the 84-year-old has relied on government assistance, to which she was entitled for five years as a refugee.

But those five years ended in February, and new laws dictate that she stop receiving food stamps and a host of other benefits she depends on for survival.

Kostoveskaya is far from alone.

Legal immigrants who are not citizens, including an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 Jews, will begin this month to feel the anticipated but dreaded federally mandated cuts in benefits.

These cuts are the parts of last year's welfare reform that President Clinton himself singled out as harsh even as he signed it.

At the time, he pledged to correct the most onerous provisions. But many immigrants are certain to endure suffering and hardship before the president's or any other proposed corrections could take effect.

As of April 1, noncitizen immigrants no longer are eligible to receive food stamps. On Aug. 1, they will begin to be cut off from Supplemental Security Income, an average of $500 and $600 monthly, which recipients spend mostly on housing.

Anticipation of these blows has triggered a rush of applications for citizenship. But some of the most frail and disabled will fall through the cracks because they are unable to perform the most minimal naturalization requirements.

Ostensibly, a new budget plan could ameliorate the law's harsh impact, but it would not be implemented until fall, at the earliest.

Some states have initiated "fixes" to offset the loss, but when such aid could be made available depends on each state's budget cycles.

Given all the uncertainty, immigrants and their advocates are taking nothing for granted. They are up in arms and trying to stave off the worst.

The Union of Councils of Soviet Jews and the American Association of Jews from the Former Soviet Union are planning a big protest April 14 on Capitol Hill. They are hoping to bring thousands of immigrants from across the country to demonstrate their fears and concerns.

"All the immigrants are very grateful to the United States" for providing them a home, but "we're very worried about the situation in the welfare bill depriving them of social benefits," said Leonid Stonov, president of the American Association.

The Council of Jewish Federations has scheduled a leadership mission April 16 to lobby the administration and Congress to remedy the harsh measures.

"This is a national tragedy in the making," said Pamela Seubert, director of government programs for the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.

"Those who supported welfare reform never envisioned that we would break the social contract with those who played by the rules," she said.

"When we discuss welfare-to-work, we're not talking about the elderly and disabled," she said.

Vast numbers of Jews entered the United States as refugees, especially from the former Soviet Union.

Refugees are not affected by the new law, and remain eligible for five years for SSI, food stamps and a host of other benefits. But after five years, they lose the benefits unless they become citizens or meet other exemptions, such as proof of work for 40 annual quarters.

Such immigrant cutoffs are illogical on their face, said Gary Rubin, public policy director of the New York Association for New Americans.

"These are people who came here in their later years and had no opportunity to build up pensions and other benefits" for their old age.

"Nobody expects this population to be self-supporting," he said.

If these people lose their benefits, it will be "impossible" for the Jewish community or anyone else to pick up the slack, he said.

The organized Jewish community is therefore concentrating its efforts on trying to soften the blows of the budget ax at the federal and state level, said Diana Aviv, director of the CJF office in Washington.

Monetarily, she said, "the communities can't make up the difference. This is one of the severest shudders the community has suffered in decades."

Meanwhile, the CJF, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and other immigrant advocacy organizations are also pushing hard to get as many people naturalized as possible.

But they say backlogs caused by frantic immigrants mean gaps of many months between the application for citizenship and naturalization, and these are months when benefits will be suspended.

Beyond those whose refugee exemption is set to expire, these initiatives target legal immigrants who have been here for years but suddenly are poised to lose their benefits unless they naturalize.

For those too frail or disabled to take the citizenship test, the Immigration and Naturalization Service issued a ruling a few weeks ago spelling out certain waivers. These will allow some people, depending on individual circumstances, to bypass certain portions of the test or take it in their native language.

But the waivers will not help some of the worst hardship cases, such as Kostoveskaya in Chicago. She already has received a letter warning of a cutoff in her SSI benefits, which total $480 a month. She will also lose her food stamps of $17 a month.

Kostoveskaya's daughter and son-in-law, also noncitizen immigrants slated to lose their federal benefits, recognize that their mother cannot become a citizen and don't know how they will care for her.

"She can no longer speak Russian, let alone English," said her daughter, Rosa Kostoveskaya. "What am I going to do with her? Should I drive her to Washington and leave her on the steps of the White House?"