Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman, a critic of evangelist Jerry Falwell in life, has voiced sadness at his death, calling him a "dear friend of Israel" who would be greatly missed.

The folksy, small-town preacher who used the power of television to found the Moral Majority and turn the Christian right into a mighty force in American politics during the Reagan years, died Tuesday at 73.

"Despite our many disagreements through the years, we were saddened to learn of the loss of the Rev. Jerry Falwell. He was a passionate leader of Christianity in America and a dear friend of Israel." Foxman said in a statement.

The ADL, while praising Falwell for his brand of Christian Zionism, was often critical of statements the organization viewed as fostering intolerance. Falwell wrote in his book America Can Be Saved that "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them."

In 2002, Foxman strongly condemned Falwell's statement that the Prophet Mohammed 'was a terrorist' and called on him to apologize to the followers of Islam. "The Rev. Jerry Falwell has once again demonstrated his intolerance by his outrageous charge about the Prophet Mohammed. He owes an apology to the millions of good people who follow the Muslim faith. As a man of the cloth, he should be working toward bringing faith communities closer together, not driving wedges through them."

Three years before, Foxman took Falwell to task for saying publicly that the Antichrist was probably a Jewish man alive today. Falwell's statement, Foxman said at the time, "borders on anti-Semitism at best and is anti-Semitic at worst."

In a statement issued after Falwell's death on Tuesday, Foxman wrote that "Rev. Falwell was a towering figure of the Religious Right, and while we often did not see eye-to-eye with him on many key issues of the day, we always respected his strong devotion to his views, his outspoken advocacy for the positions he took on behalf of America's conservative Christians, and his ability to listen to even his most ardent critics," Foxman said. "He will be greatly missed."

Driven into politics by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established the right to an abortion, Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. One of the conservative lobbying group's greatest triumphs came just a year later, when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

Falwell credited the Moral Majority with getting millions of conservative voters registered, aiding in Reagan's victory and giving Republicans control of the Senate.

"I shudder to think where the country would be right now if the religious right had not evolved," he said when he stepped down as Moral Majority president in 1987.