A deleted issue in Jira is totally gone, there's nothing left, so "we would like to open and read for audit" is not going to happen if you choose to delete. (There's nothing wrong with the idea of retention for audit, I just want to be 100% clear that "delete means delete", which breaks your audit automatically)
You will need to come up with a way to retain your issues.
The most simple approach is to simply use permissions to "archive" - this means taking a project (or, of course, many) and applying read-only permissions to them, but it does not do a lot more than simple visibility.
If you had Jira data-center, there is a more structured archive - you actually get to choose between active and archived when searching.
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